Internal Audit Case Study

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From the global financial scandals to corporate financial fraud, there has been increasingly focuses and recognition on the significant role of corporate governance in ensuring sound financial policies and fraud prevention. This research aims to identify the relationship between internal audit and senior management, and specifically focuses on the gap of perceptions and expectations of the value of internal audit function in monitoring of fraud prevention with respect to each other in New Zealand context.

1.0 Literature / Past Research Review

As Norwani et al (2011) mentioned, corporate governance is one of the most important elements in identifying company’s strengths and functions. There are four key mechanisms of corporate governance,
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Based on the past studies on relationship between senior management and internal audit, the previous studies can be classified into following three categories: The responsibilities of senior management on corporate governance, risk control and internal audit; how senior management support internal audit, how internal audit support senior management for better corporate governance and risk management. As Arena, Arnaboldi and Azzone (2006) mentioned, the increasing numbers of financial scandals of recent years have highlighted the weakness of many companies’ control system, increasingly attention on internal audit and internal controls and their role in modern organizations. As mentioned most empirical work related to internal audit’s relationship with other organizational parties deals with the relationship between internal audit and the audit committee as found by Sarens and Beelde (2006), the significant of this study is to identify the gap of perceptions and …show more content…
Sub-Question Three – What support does internal audit expect to get from senior management?

Methodology / Method

In order to response the past existing research (e.g. Goodwin, J.& Yao, T, Y (2001); Mathews, C., Cooper, B. j. & Leung, p. (1995); Sarens & Beelde (2006)) in the similar area, a qualitative study will be carried out by using qualitative data to obtain more in-depth understanding of the relationship between senior management and internal audit in New Zealand context.

The method of Case Study will be conducted for this research; five to six different sizes companies will be selected as case study samples. Semi-structured interviews to internal auditors will be conducted for each company, also the senior management members (such as CEO, CFO) will be interviewed. Conjoint with semi-structured interview, review of the internal audit policies and procedures as well as internal audit records will be review as part of the case study.

The reason for using Case Study as the methodology is to use extensive, multiple sources of information in data collection to provide the detailed in-depth understanding of the phenomenon.

4.0

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