Early Career Critical Thinking The Internal Audit department at Pluto - Cola assigns its team members to
Question:
PlutoColas RPA COE only has capacity to work on two projects for the Internal Audit department this year. As a kickoff this year, your working group is meeting to review suggestions for automation that were collected from the rest of the internal auditors last month. Your working group needs to prioritize the top three suggestions to present to the Internal Audit leadership team. From there, the leadership team will provide feedback on which two should be selected for this years initiatives.
Choose three of the following automation suggestions and explain why you believe each of them is a top candidate for RPA transformation:
A Quarterly board reporting requires collecting information from the past quarters audit reports, which are saved in uniform audit report files on a shared drive. The Internal Audit strategy director must access every report to copy and paste audit issues and conclusions
into the boardreporting PowerPoint deck.
B Each year, the regional audit directors perform an annual audit risk assessment. One metric they use is the prior years audits, which indicates how many years it is been since a risk category has been audited. To achieve this, they open the prior years audit plan and manually add the names of the areas that were audited last year.
C Every year the audit department must perform a specific regulatory review. It takes three auditors two weeks to complete this engagement. One step is manually reviewing about contracts to verify that the prices match what is in the businesss Excel file.
D Before each audit engagement, the audit team sends an email announcement, informing the leadership of the department to be audited that an audit is forthcoming. This email includes specifics like the reason this area was selected for an audit this year, which
is unique to each audit.
E During an audit, the team records information in an audit template that captures things like findings, commentary, and recommendations. These items are eventually copied and pasted into the formal audit report template, which will later be sent out to the stakeholders. Every audit uses the same template for capturing information during the engagement and the same template for the formal audit report.
F Every year, there are two or three audit engagements that are advisory in nature. This means they are special projects focused on providing feedback to the business on how to improve a specific process or provide subject matter expertise. Heavy amounts of ad hoc communication are involved, including emails, memos, and reports.