The internal auditing director recently sent some internal control guidelines to the director of the EDP department. The EDP department was designing a new production costing and inventory control system and requested some control guidelines from the internal auditing department. The director of EDP made the following statement to one of his colleagues in the department: "The auditors are going to be looking at our new system sooner or later, anyway. We may as well build the controls into the program now, so we won't have to make major changes later."

Required:

a. Does providing such control guidelines jeopardize the internal auditor's independence and/or objectivity? Why?

b. Suppose the EDP director actually sent the finished program to the internal auditors to study for internal control weaknesses and to recommend changes for improved control of production costs and savings. If this were done before implementation of the system, and the EDP department incorporated the recommended changes into the program, what effect would this situation have upon the internal auditors' independence and objectivity in future audits of the EDP department?