SUPPORT CENTER
Q&A 4th Qtr 2001

Date: 11/26/01

Question: We attended an IIA seminar you gave and are implementing RBIA. Some of our auditors are not interested in working in teams and claim that they did not sign on to the audit department to do RBIA. Any thoughts?

Answer: They have a point. There are a lot of "behind the scenes" issues that you have to address before implementing RBIA. We do not have time to address these in our 4 day RBIA seminar let alone during a one day overview. I suggest that you get hold of the "Implementing RBIA" guide on this web site and pay attention to the Human Resource and Legal issues that are identified. Your General Auditor will have to address them before your implementation will be successful.

Date:    11/06/01

Question: What is the single biggest mistake that audit groups make when they implement RBIA?

Answer: Failing to implement the organization components of RBIA would probably cause more problems than anything else. RBIA consists of a business tool based THEORY component, a team based ORGANIZATION component and a heuristic METHODOLOGY component.

The increased value and productivity that RBIA can deliver comes from the ORGANIZATION and METHODOLOGY components working together as we designed them to. Audit groups that do not implement the team based concepts properly, i.e., they stay in rigid hierarchical structures (where each manager has their own staff and allocates tasks to those staff members) invariably end up with disguised audit programs or work plans of some sort. Whenever you have audit programs it is impossible to add any value since all the focus is on completing the tasks assigned in the audit program, not on appraising the business risk/controls situations. Then no one is accountable for the end result since you have created a situation where everyone hides behind their "I did the tasks assigned to me" protection. Value and productivity go out the window. During such post- mortems, it almost always boils down to a failure to implement the RBIA team based structures properly, i.e., people do not want to change the way they do things. This comes mainly from the "I'm a manager, I manage" syndrome.

The Best of the Best for 2006

RBIA Gold Medal
Ms. Martha Mimica, Florida Power & Light

RBIA Silver Medal
Mr. Bill Egan, Scotts Company

RBIA Bronze Medal
Mr. Dan Ashley, Qwest Communications

Congratulations!
prior year winners

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Updated: February 2, 2007