Internal audit: Difference between revisions

{{a|people|[[File:Wakeup.jpg|450px|frameless|center]]}}[[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 neuron fired across the chaotic [[Cartesian]] theatre comprising a modern corporation’s immortal soul. Once upon a time those, neurons found material form only in the terse syntax of printed memoranda, languidly stewarded between the organisation’s in-trays and pneumatic nodes 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. But boy has that changed.

The secret, for the most part, is to steer clear of [[service level agreements]], [[key performance indicators]], [[target operating model]]s. Articulate your contribution to the ongoing well-being of the firm in gnomic utterances: deprecate all measurable aspects of your performance. The experienced commercial solicitor is a vessel for ineffable wisdom. His output is incomprehensible genius — its very genius is that it ''is'' incomprehensible, and no-one: not he, not his colleagues, not his counterparts, can fathom what it all means — so this is largely manageable.  

The ''reductio ad absurdam'' of the foregoing: [[internal audit]]ors have recently hit upon the need to internally audit ''themselves''. To the extent this is not auto-erotic, it is potentially dystopian — then again, the auto-erotic is the same glass, half-full, as the dystopian is half-empty.  

But might that forthcoming moment, whereupon [[All watched over by the machines of loving grace|the machines who, with loving grace, watch over us]] begin to watch over ''themselves'', be the greatly-anticipated inflection point at which our fallow [[corporation]] — famously, a [[Legal personality|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?