NOTES FROM INTERNAL AUDITORS: ISSUES IN COMBATING FRAUD

Purpose: This paper is to provide valuable notes for internal auditors. We know that corporate governance is about the way in which boards oversee the running of an organisation, and how board members are in turn accountable to the organisation’s stakeholders. This has implications for the organisation’s behaviour towards its employees, shareholders, customers and other stakeholders. And internal audit’s role is to assess these concerns. In effect, it can improve levels of transparency and accountability in an organisational activities. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected with impartial cross?referencing of papers published in all major journals in the accounting and auditing. The paper systematically classifies the published literature, and also identifies the possible gaps that can be considered by future studies. Findings: An organisation’s internal environment has a significant impact on how enterprise risk management is implemented and functions on an ongoing basis. The internal environment is the context in which other components of enterprise risk management are applied, typically with powerful effect, either positive or negative. In this respect, internal auditors should scrutinise potential weaknesses in companies’ control processes and provide a root-cause analysis in case of failures. It is suggested that internal audit touches all the primary activities in the organisational value chain, and, in addition, can streamline support activities through compliance audits and process evaluations. How organisations deal with the risk of fraud may be influenced by internal auditors’ role and the organisation’s own risk assessment and appetite. Originality: If management is aware of the misalignment, do they have adequate processes and controls to resolve those disconnects? Adequate processes and controls alone will not sufficiently resolve the problem. Some reasons management may be aware of the problem but cannot fix it include, weak leadership, rogue managers in key positions, poor corporate culture, and bad communication between senior executives and business units or functions. So in this study, it is offered some valuable discussion about possible preventive measures that could be used by organisation to deter fraud, and used by further fraud studies to examine their efficacy in promoting fraud prevention theory.