THE GLOBAL INTERNAL AUDIT STANDARDS – OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES?

Abstract

In this paper the authors suggest that the Global Internal Audit Standards (the IIA’s Standards) issued in January 2024 resemble the placing of old wine in new bottles, insofar as they represent a missed opportunity to truly transform rules-driven Standards into principles-based Standards. This co-authored essay provides two perspectives on the revised Standards: although written independently, and originating from different premises, they both arrive at similar conclusions in favor of principles-based Standards. The authors suggest that the prescriptiveness of the IIA’s Standards continues to petrify individual judgment and critical reasoning, narrowing intellectual and moral horizons in modern internal auditing. By following rules, the focus of internal auditors is misguided toward form over substance, encouraging a checklist-based mind-set that diminishes moral agency. The authors therefore advocate principles-based Standards because they tend to encourage the internal auditor to apply abstract concepts to concrete examples. The authors see unexploited potential inherent in the encouragement of individual judgment, especially when entering the pioneering zone of the pragmatic implementation of the IIA’s Standards – a zone characterized by complexity, chaos, ambiguity, and trade-offs, in which internal auditors are compelled to address WHAT IF types of question. Although the two authors converge in their overall conclusion, they offer alternative reasons for their views, and differing (though perhaps not entirely irreconcilable) suggestions for the future. Lenz draws our attention, in our VUCA and BANI world, and in the age of artificial intelligence, to rethink what it means to be human, and to rethink the skills that make internal auditors strong, influential, and effective. He presents the Trust Triangle that places authenticity as an anchor term to the discourse. Effective internal auditors must have strong human skills: he therefore suggests a model with five competence blocks of the most important skills of the effective internal auditor. There is no need for humans who behave like robots. The refined leitmotif of “The Gardener of Governance: Our nature is Nurture” is suggested as purposeful for internal auditing. O’Regan proposes a future focus on the rigorous application of traditional logic to internal auditing. He suggests that such an emphasis on logic might offset the socially-constructed, slippery, and ever-changing knowledge base of internal auditing, thereby facilitating the development of principles-based standard-setting.