In companies, what are the tasks of the Internal Audit Department?

Answer 1

My understanding of Internal Auditing is for the purpose of keep costs low. Some examples:

1.) They work to find inefficiencies in process through high costs either in terms of time or money. If you audit say a shipping process, you might find that there are ways to speed up the process or lower the cost of processing.

The former allows the same number of people to do more work faster - this leads to indirect cost savings and/or increased profit.

The latter allows for direct financial savings.

2.) Finding ways to avoid 'shrinkage' due to employee theft, employee breakage, employee mistakes.

Say an employee steals (much bigger problem than customer theft) then if you can find the culprit or remove the opportunity to steal, you reduce shrinkage.

Say an employee breaks something (product or equipment like a network printer) Perhaps using different printers that are easier to load paper and ink into would help prevent the cost of breakage of the current printers.

Say employees in a certain department are making alot of mistakes. Perhaps the cost of increased training over time will be less than the cost of the mistakes themselves. If it is, more training is a good investment.