Internal audit
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People Anatomy™
A spotter’s guide to the men and women of finance.
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Men and women who understand the deadline for everything, but the point of nothing, these are the blessèd folk whose lot in life is to assess your compliance with measurable criteria because — not being subject matter experts — they have no means of assessing anything else.
Your department’s commitment — probably given, in a typical moment of weakness or inattention, by the GC who was GC three GCs ago — to review annually the firm’s fleet of template confidentiality agreements is a fertile hunting ground for the kind of operational error incidents which are IA’s meat and drink.
It will not matter whether anyone used the template, much less that there was nothing wrong with it — your failure to do what Chip, in your absence,[1] committed to do, quod erat demonstrandum is grounds for censure.
Similarly, one hazards instant dismissal should one not complete all computer-based training by the designated time — there will be many system-generated email reminders, make no mistake — no matter how pointless the topic[2] or asinine the training on it — if in doubt the answer is “all of the above” —may be.
By contrast, your total incompetence when negotiating a indemnity will fly leagues over internal audit’s head, because not a man-jack among those who work there would have the first clue what gross negligence even is, let alone what amounts to it, much less how one would recognise an indemnity if it slapped one in the face, whether suitably carved out or not. Result: almost no lawyer in history has ever known how to properly use an indemnity, but internal audit have never been the wiser. In the mean time, the financial system seems to have weathered our collective feyness about indemnities all right. So far.
The secret, for the most part, is to steer clear of service level agreements, key performance indicators, target operating models. Articulate your contribution to the ongoing well-being and measurable aspects of your performance. The experienced commercial solicitor is a vessel for ineffable wisdom. His output is incomprehensible genius. So in large part this is quite manageable.
Internal audit as bloatware
Internal audit as we know it today is possible only thanks to the information revolution, whose enabling technology naturally captures, time-stamps and taxonomises every corporate neuron fired across the theatre of chaotic conflict comprising a modern corporation’s immortal soul. Once upon a time those, neurons had form only in the terse syntax of printed memoranda languidly stewarded between the in-trays and pneumatic nodes of the organisation, by wheezy mailmen with green visors and sleeve garters. In that benighted time there was nothing much to audit, and no-one paid much mind to the curmudgeonly old chap in the basement office who was asked to do it.
Who monitors the monitors?
Internal auditors have recently hit upon the need to internally audit themselves. To the extent there is not something auto-erotic about this, there is something potentially dystopian about it. May this be the point, greatly anticipated, at which the fallow corporation — famously, a person in legal fiction, able to sue and be sued but not one in a social sense, able to share a pint down that the local — becomes self-aware?
See also
Dramatis personae: CEO | CFO | Client | Employees: Divers · Excuse pre-loaders · Survivors · Contractors · The Muppet Show | Middle management: COO · Consultant · MBA | Controllers: Financial reporting | Risk | Credit | Operations | IT | Legal: GC · Inhouse counsel · Docs unit · Litigator · Tax lawyer · US attorney Lawyer | Front office: Trading | Structuring | Sales |