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What kind of of career/academic background should your internal audit members possess?
I feel that they should be school owners and directors of schools. I don't agree with bringing in lawyers and others that have no part in schools and have no clue about the private school business.
Ashley,
I like the concept of the campus visitation analysis. Sharing best practices can be greatly beneficial!
Traci Lee
This is the approach of our company as well. We have annual internal audits of our 6 campuses to look for policy and compliance deficiencies which could in turn lead to a follow up audit. These are conducting by our compliance director who has no individual interest in the campuses other than there success. It is easy to see how an internal audit by your own department heads could easily turn into a pat on the back session. We then have a campus visitation analysis which combines visiting members from other campuses to share best practices.
I do not think it is necessary to have a master's degree. Maybe, it would matter depending upon the type of institution you are at.
Albert,
This is great to see - especially faculty involvement which can often be overlooked. And the peer collaboration is also a nice approach!
Traci Lee
I (department chair) include virtually every aspect of my campus in my internal audit: the faculty within my department, financial planning/compliance, registrar, career services, and admissions. As others have stated, my college has another campus whose Dept. Chair has vast experience, and I look to her for advice. Within my own campus, I also pick the brains of other programs' chairs who have passed audits for their respective programs, to enhance my preparedness for the process. I feel that for me, it will expose and enlighten me to a fuller understanding of my program outside of curricula and academics.
Erica,
It's excellent to see this kind of campus-to-campus review. I think there are other side benefits to this experience as I always learn something new when I visit various campuses.
Traci Lee
We do our internal audits the same way as Mala, with a person from each campus visiting other campuses. We also have a few employees from each campus responsible for reviewing the files before and after the audits to ensure they are in compliance regularly. A checklist to use doing the review is key. I do not think an internal staff member has to have at least 5 years of experience. Our "team" has staff with less experience. What is most important is their attention to detail to "catch" what others may have missed before a real audit takes place.
I agree having a team with a variety of experience can only benefit by having insight from a mixture of backgrounds.
Internal audit members should be well educated about related fiels and have experience
The audit team should be comprised of members with the appropriate experience to fully evaluate their assigned aspects for compliance. In other words, most academic personnel are not qualified to audit all aspects of the Student Finance operation. To an extent, this can be accomodated by having a well developed audit process however, it's my believe that this is one area where process can not make up for experience (there's simply too much to look for). I do favor including inexperienced staff as well in that an audit can be very educational for them.
Fears of bias can be alleviated in three ways: publishing the list of auditors and giving both the to-be-audited entity and the auditors the opportunity to address perceived biases, ensuring that the initial audit is intended to be educational (the goal is to learn and get it right) and finally, holding the auditors as well as the auditted accountable to their results.
I work for a school with many campuses. If staff from one campus were to audit other campuses, they would bring a fresh, objective vision , which the "hometown" staff would not have. Also the visiting staff could learn from the approach of the host campus.
Spencer,
Such conflicts of interest are certainly a risk. Some audit testing lends itself to more objectivity than others.
Traci Lee
If every member of the audit team is part of another department then the audit will not be independent. A member of a team may be reluctant to say their good friend (who's a co-worker) or even themselves made a large mistake. It would lead to subjective conclusions rather than objective conclusions.
I agree that internal audit team members should be a good mix of Academic and financial aid personal. I prefer to have management and department managers involved so there is less pointing fingers at each other and work to together as a team to take care of the findings. We are a school with about 200 students so this has been helpful so far, so moving forward might have to adjust.
Audit team memebers should be from every dept. and include senior staff members who have been through the accreditation process.