A selection of blog posts by James Paterson.

A good audit planning process should also act as a platform to showcase what audit can do and build closer relationships with key stakeholders, writes James C Paterson on the ACCA blog.
For the past 10 years I have been running a course on audit planning. It’s two days long and we often start with heads of audit and audit managers explaining their planning process. Common planning steps include consulting managers and the audit committee, up-dating the audit universe and considering areas of concern for Internal Audit and/or a regulator. After that, differences start to emerge, from:
Then greater differences emerge when we discuss the length of any audit cycle, or what items are in/out of the scope of the audit universe, and what the weighting factors are for the audit universe risk ranking.
It then dawns on many that their audit planning process is effectively a hotchpotch of historical steps, overlaid with specific priorities, where specific factors and weightings cannot be justified other than by explaining that:
The net result of this is that some audit functions are auditing “the risks that matter”: i.e. strategic risks, major projects and programmes and key third-party dependencies, whereas others are auditing mostly basic compliance, control and other standard processes.
We then discuss key finding areas from recent IIA External Quality Assessments and learn that many audit functions fall down against the IIA standard for planning and IIA requirements around co-ordination with others. The requirements include:
Thus the reason there are short-comings in audit plans is because they are mostly based on stakeholder opinions and an audit universe, which is then retrospectively tied back to key risks etc. Most decent EQAs nowadays can tell this is how the plan was prepared, and may have concerns about why some items are in/not in the audit plan.
Remember: You can’t get a good plan by pressing entering data into a model and pressing a compute button, and you don’t have a good audit plan just because everyone is happy with it!
You can read the rest of this article on the ACCA website
In this time of lock-down I have been working in more virtual ways with webinars, and also talking to friends and colleagues on topics that may be interesting.
The first videos are on:
Introductions and series overview – what we hope you will learn Continue Reading
As we adjust to new ways of working I have been working with my friends in the IIA across Europe to deliver engaging webinars on a range of key topics.
Details of internal audit webinars are as follows:
IIA UK:
IIA BEL:
IIA Finland:
IIA Norway:
Timings for split sessions are as follows:
Morning sessions are 09.00 to 12.15 local time
Afternoon sessions are 13.00 to 16.30 local time
E-mail info@RiskAI.co.uk for more information, including tailored training on other topics.
Hope you can join me…
and that applies to internal audit as well…
The following article has had over 500 views in 2 days on LinkedIn, I hope you find it helpful.
I’ve just facilitated a two-day head of audit event, with only one person pulling out because of COVID19. However, it was inevitably a key topic of conversation, and here are some reflections that might be of interest:
COVID19 has reinforced, again, the problem with a “failure of imagination” in many risk management processes.
A failure of imagination was one of the key learnings from the 9/11 tragedy, and it looks like many organisations have found themselves with a similar problem with COVID19, and all its knock-on impacts. It may not be a big priority right now, but all organisations who have felt blind-sided by what has happened should be prepared, at the right time, to take a long hard look at their risk management processes.
What other risks are there where might we be thinking “that will never happen”?
How do we make sure we prioritise impact over probability?
How good is your organisation in thinking through the knock-on consequences of one risk on other aspects of its operations? Continue Reading
Does internal audit have a blind spot concerning organizational politics?
I was pleased to be asked to present at the 2019 ECIIA conference in Luxembourg. It was an honour and a privilege to present to around 700 attendees. The key messages I delivered were:
I defined organizational politics as:
Organizational politics can be seen in a good or bad light, depending on whether the political activity is genuinely for an organizational benefit, compared to primarily benefiting an individual’s career, power and/or influence.
Continue ReadingContact and appointments:
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