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 time of darkness 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.  

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?