A Christmas Gift

Man cannot discover new oceans until he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

As 2009 draws to a close we decided that we would seek out the many manifestations of risk management as a Christmas gift to our dear readers.

We came across this:

http://www.christmastreeriskmanagement.com/

We are not making this up! It is a genuine site.

Never let it be said that the management of risk isn’t everywhere!

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To our 450 subscribers thank you for taking the time to be engaged, challenged, educated, provoked, interested.

Thanks for all your comments about the weekly updates.

Easily the post that generated the most debate was The Violin Theorem:

http://www.honestlylaybare.com/2009/05/violin-theorem.html

Makes you wonder whether a man is allowed to dance anymore! :)

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We are off now on a well earned break (or at least we think so).

Honestly Lay Bare will be back in 2010 with plans for a new website; a greater Twitter presence www.twitter.com/tom_mcleod is where we are at the moment and podcasts with leading internal audit, risk management and corporate governance practitioners

And even if none of that ever comes to fruition (of course there is a good chance that it wont!) weekly updates on publicly available information of instances of either best / worst practice internal control situations will continue unabated.

The next update will be on Wednesday 13th January 2010.

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To you and your family from Honestly Lay Bare, Mrs Honestly Lay Bare, Auditor 1 and Auditor 2 may you have a safe and happy festive season and may 2010 bring you all that you so richly deserve.

The Influencers

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind

In this the penultimate Honestly Lay Bare for 2009, we are taking time out to consider who it is that helped shape our understanding of internal audit this year.

Now before we start naming names we want to make a big bold caveat ... this is a list of those that shaped Honestly Lay Bare's thinking in 2009.

Are these people the definitive thought leaders – well only you can say.

So sit back, put your feet up and in no particular order except position number one ... lets start the show.

Todd Davies

Australia is blessed not only with amazing natural beauty, a robust democracy and beautiful women (Tiger please stay away!) but in the humble opinion of Honestly Lay Bare it has probably the highest concentration of first class internal audit thought leadership anywhere on the globe.

We are not sure whether that is because Australia never introduced its version of Sarbanes Oxley which in the view of this humble observer has sucked the spark out of the previously strong North American engine room (note to consultants – the rest of the world is tiring of section 404 research pieces. We KNOW that the costs outweigh the benefits!).

As such it was very difficult to single out any one person in Australia as there are so many to choose from (you know who you are!) but if we had to choose one person – at least until bribes are received from others – it would be one T Davies.

Todd is the Technical and Policy Director at the Institute of Internal Auditors in Australia.

What makes Todd important to how Honestly Lay Bare thinks about the world of internal audit is that, despite being good friends, we are only in agreement about 30% of the time.

To be more precise, a third of the time Honestly Lay Bare has no idea what Todd is talking about (the first time we heard the phrase “resilient futures” Honestly Lay Bare carried on a whole conversation with Todd ignorant to what “resilient futures” meant) and that intellectual vacuum drives us to get ourselves up to speed quick smart.

The remainder of the time we are pushed to codify our thoughts so that we can determine whether we agree or whether we agree to disagree.

And isn’t that the key to being a thought leader?

Someone that pushes our understanding of the profession to a new degree – even at the precise moment that your views may be diagrammatically opposite or not yet formed.

Todd can be found at:

http://twitter.com/todddavies

Francine McKenna

Francine McKenna is the future of thought leadership in the audit space.

And – with due respects to her always high quality writings at http://www.retheauditors.com/ – it has NOTHING to do with what she writes.

It is what she does that is amazing.

To the best of Honestly Lay Bare’s knowledge (a caveat if there has ever been one), Francine’s Twitter following of in excess of 4,100 (yes you read right!) people is the largest following of anyone in the audit space in the Twitterverse.

And that is what makes her the future of thought leadership.

By definition, the people that have chosen (and remember that signing up to be a follower on Twitter is a voluntary act) are seeking to be engaged in the discussions primarily about audit (and Chicago restaurants!) that Francine conducts.

At any one time Francine has a following of more people than all but the largest Institutes of Internal Audit.

By comparison, the Institute of Internal Auditors twitter following as of Tuesday of this week is 275.

That is 6% of Francine’s followers.

Perhaps even the greater comparison is that Francine has the equivalent of 2.5% of the worldwide membership of the Institute of Internal Auditors following her.

What is more powerful – 4,000+ engaged followers or 160,000 members.

There is a huge difference between engaged followers and members and it is that difference will dictate the future of thought leadership in this space.

It will no longer be the sole domain of professional representative bodies.

Game on!

Francine’s twittering can be found at:

http://twitter.com/retheauditors

Cynthia Cooper

It may seem strange to the readers of Honestly Lay Bare that included in the list of people that have most influenced Honestly Lay Bare in 2009 is a person most famous for something that they did in 2002.

Cynthia – as you may recall was the former Vice President of Internal Audit at WorldCom. In 2002, Cynthia and her team of auditors worked together and often at night and in secret to investigate and unearth US$3.8 billion in fraud at WorldCom. At the time, this was the largest incident of accounting fraud in United States history.

The reason why Cynthia is on the list of people that most influenced Honestly Lay Bare in 2009 is – quite simply – she has written the most compelling book on the break down of internal controls that the profession of internal audit probably has ever seen. Her book about her life and the WorldCom fraud Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower was published in 2008.

If there is one book that Honestly Lay Bare would encourage every current and potential internal auditor to read it would be Cynthia's book. It shows the challenges and risks that she and her team had to take and demonstrates why being in Internal Audit is both a huge privilege and a huge responsibility.

Honestly Lay Bare had the pleasure of meeting Cynthia and spending time with her during a 2008 Australian book tour.

Her courage was admirable but what was more impressive is that - when it mattered most - she stood up and was counted.

How many amongst us can say the same.

Any person that has worked with Honestly Lay Bare since 2008 has received a copy of the book.

Come to think of it – a dream of Honestly Lay Bare is that the 160,000 members of the Institute of Internal Auditors receive a copy of the book with their next membership subscription.

Why?

Read it and you will see.

Cynthia’s book can be found at:

http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Circumstances-Journey-Corporate-Whistleblower/dp/0470443316/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260264347&sr=8-1

Her consultancy can be found at:

http://www.coopergrouptraining.com/.

And first place goes to .... Mrs Honestly Lay Bare

Lets get something very clear here – Honestly Lay Bare married above his station in life.

Not selling ourself short here – just stating facts.

That fact has had many positive impacts over the last decade none more so than the birth of Auditor 1 and Auditor 2.

But as much as we would like to spend the remainder of today’s update on topics the closest to our hearts we want to thank Mrs Honestly Lay Bare for taking Honestly Lay Bare out of the world of internal audit and in doing so giving Honestly Lay Bare an incredible view back to the world of internal audit.

This has allowed Honestly Lay Bare to see control failings for what they are or were.

This has allowed Honestly Lay Bare to remember that not all managerial errors are deliberate.

This has allowed Honestly Lay Bare to stay sane when that moment that we have all confronted visits us – why exactly am I am auditor!

To Mrs Honestly Lay Bare – thank you.

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And to all others – I have a sneaking suspicion that you are never going to get to Numero Uno in terms of influencers but second aint bad!

Confessions of an Undercover Auditor

Every breath you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you

Honestly Lay Bare recently stumbled across a fascinating article in the US automotive magazine Edmunds.

It was titled Confessions of a Car Salesman and the link to the nine parts of the story can be found at:

http://www.edmunds.com/advice/buying/articles/42962/article.html

The premise of the series was to send a journalist into the back rooms of a car dealership to find out what really goes on.

What does the car salesman do when he leaves you sitting in a sales office and goes to talk to his boss?

What are the tricks salespeople use to increase their profit and how could consumers protect themselves from overpaying?

The journalist spent time in two dealerships in the Los Angeles area – firstly a high volume, high pressure dealership selling Japanese cars. Then he changed to a smaller car lot that sold domestic cars at a ‘no haggle’ price.

Even if you read nothing more of this Honestly Lay Bare post (and we sure hope you do read more!), we would strongly encourage you to click on the link above.

It (and Honestly Lay Bare, of course) is essential reading for anyone that has ever seen a car; driven a car; bought a car or sold a car.

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The series of articles got Honestly Lay Bare thinking.

Would the internal control environment of an organisation benefit more from auditors operating undercover in a similar capacity?

Now – before you get on your stirrups and mount the proverbial high horse – we are not sitting here in our tower of green ivory advocating that Internal Audit should become or revert to being a policeman role.

What we are actually holding out as a suggestion is that Internal Audit forgets about the mantra of “Internal Audit as a Business Partner” that is in everyone’s mandate and actually consider whether it would be more efficient and effective for the internal audit skill set to be anonymously embedded into high risks functions under the guise of another role description.

How exactly would that work and has Honestly Lay Bare finally lost its mind?

Lets deal with the first question first. The second question is for you, dear kind reader, to determine.

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In our mind, the Internal Auditor as a Policeman openly seeks to enforce policies, procedures and guidelines that others have devised.

Just as with real life cops – the Internal Auditor as a Policeman can know no subjectivity.

A rule is a rule. And ultimately that is this approach’s downfall. It has no flexibility.

(That – and the fact that just as with real cops – people tend to be scared or at least act differently around such figures of conferred authority).

Conversely, the Internal Auditor as a Business Partner (aahhh ... 1994 ... the first time that a consultant dreamt up this phrase ... happy 15th Anniversary!) seeks to work with the business to encourage compliance based on a call to the best angels of Management’s intentions.

The problem with the Internal Auditor as a Business Partner is that the person and the role can be captured by a devious Management seeking to avoid greater scrutiny of a function or a process.

The key tenement of Internal Audit – independence of judgment – is tainted by definition if you are partnering when that partnering takes the form of the creation and sustainment of joint goals.

Hence Honestly Lay Bare is putting forward another alternative today in this never ending democracy of ideas.

We are not actually sure how we would engineer it (ie – how do you get someone into a role and then tell them that they actually have two hats one of which can never be seen) ... but if we could ... we think that there would be enormous benefits in Internal Auditors being embedded into business units.

It would be their role to see what is happening when the intense light of independent assurance is not present.

It would be their role to document precisely the processes by which decisions are made and resources allocated. (Everyone knows that a process as defined to Internal Audit by Management is rarely exactly how the process works in real time).

It would be their role to seek to improve processes where the processes needed improving.

It would be their role to promulgate best practices where such endeavours are noted.

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A left of centre thought?

Yes.

One that has so many logical, philosophical and legal challenges that it doesn’t bode well already?

Perhaps.

However, just when you think that it is not worth pursuing.

Ask yourself one question.

Once you read the Edmunds article – will the experience of buying a car ever be the same again?

And if the answer is yes – then you have your answer.

The only reason that you now know what you know about buying and selling cars is that someone did what we are now suggesting.

An anonymous embed.