Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Coordination Between Internal Control and Internal Audit: A Survey-Based Analysis on Turkish Banking Sector

Abstract

Audit is the process which evaluates the suitability of operations of a company according to the rules. In this process, firstly, the rules related to the operations should be identified. Secondly, necessary information for these operations should be obtained. Thirdly, there is a comparison with this information and the rules to understand whether the company performs effectively or not. In this step, all deficiencies related to the company can be identified. Fourthly, these deficiencies are sent to necessary department managers. Another important point of the audit is that there will be a periodic control to see if these deficiencies are corrected or not. Banks are the companies in which audit works are conducted by different parties. There is an internal audit department that makes a control for the operations of the banks for a period. In other words, it gives independent assurance about the effectiveness of the operations made by personnel of the banks. In addition, internal control department makes also audit works for ongoing process. Similar to the internal auditors, internal control personnel also work in the banks. Also, there are external auditors and state auditors. As it can be seen above, there are many audit works in the banks which are performed by different parties. However, if the similar works are made by these parties, this situation has a decreasing effect on the effectiveness of the works because all parties will consume time for the same works. Therefore, there should be coordination between assurance providers. Within this context, Performance Standard 2050 emphasizes that audit works should be coordinated and hence audit works can be conducted more effectively. It is clear that coordination between assurance providers is very significant. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the coordination between internal control and internal audit departments in Turkish banking sector. In order to reach the stated aim, a research was made with employees who work in internal audit and internal control departments and chi-square test was used to analyze survey responses. According to results, there are some deficiencies regarding coordination of audits. Almost all cases that are questioned in the survey are controlled by both internal control and internal control departments. However, these participants think that audit works are coordinated. This result shows that there is a communication problem between internal control and internal audit departments. To provide full coordinated audit works between internal control and internal audit departments, it is appropriate that banks should take corrective actions. In this context, issues stated in our study will have bank guiding characteristics.