I ran another Root Cause Analysis (RCA) workshop this week in London, with participants from the Financial services sector, Oil and Gas and Public sector. All those attending agreed that proper RCA was important to get to the heart of issues and to enable Internal Audit to provide insights, but none had done any formal training of any length on the topic and most had no explicit, consistent, RCA methodology defined.
We explored the root causes of how such an important topic could be relatively neglected, which includes its absence from current IIA standards, and came up with themes that I have heard on many other workshops, ranging from: “As auditors we have a natural instinct about root causes” to “There is limited time during assignments to do a proper RCA” to “Robust RCA would highlight quite sensitive matters and put us into conflict with management”. Continue Reading