Question

DQ4. The quality of an internal auditor's conclusions depend on their ability to gather and evaluate eviderice. What are some of the barriers/obstacles to obtaining appropriate and sufficient evidence? What are you thoughts on how to overcome these barriers?

Answer 1

The Internal auditor's abilities to gather and evaluate evidence are extremely important for the conclusions. There are many obstacles to obtaining appropriate and sufficient evidence:

1. Lack of resources

The auditor needs information for his/her work to be completed, for which the client needs to provide people for extracting the information required. Many a times, the client's employees end up delaying their own work for supporting the auditor. Other times, the client itself might be short staffed for helping the auditor extracting the required information.

2. Problems between team members

The client place might have certain employees who have certain issues among themselves, for which they might refuse to co-operate with the auditor, thereby delaying the audit.

3. Lack of expertise

The auditor may not be knowing about the client's business, or might take some time to understand the nitty-gritties in case of it being too technical. This might take time in completing the said audit on time and hence the auditor may need another person to explain details to him.

4. Organizational impediments

The client might be busy when the auditor goes for audit, since it might be a peak season for the client and hence they might not be in a position to help the auditor, leading to delays in audit completion.

Overcoming the above barriers:

The auditor needs to plan well ahead for the timely completion of the audit. This planning includes the below mentioned points, which the auditor needs to keep in mind:

1. Studying the client's business:

the auditor has to take some time out to know all the details of the client so as not to waste time after going to the client place knowing everything from scratch.

2. Ability to tactfully extract relevant information:

The auditor has to have tact to skilfully extract relevant information from the client's employees, who might have issues among themselves leading to non-co-operation among them.

3. Informing clients beforehand:

The auditor has to inform the client about the resources required by him/her for completing the audit beforehand, so that the client can make arrangements accordingly. This includes whatever resources are required and also information from the client whether the client has peak period duration going on or starting during the audit, which will definitely help the auditor complete the audit on time or schedule the audit accordingly.