Internal Audit – Future Trends and Innovation and Emerging Scope for CMAs

Abstract

Internal audit (IA) is moving towards evaluating Risk management, controls and governance. Companies Act, 2013 has also recognized CMA as one of the professional for conducting IA. Future of IA is in Big data analysis, Automated audit and assurance, Cyber security, Continuous risk assessments, Resource utilization audits and Intelligent automation and cloud computing. Trillions of data gathered over past years provide a huge opportunity for analysis for better decision making. ERPs provide for automated audits. Audit parameters are set in advance, which results in continuous analysis of the process and controls, and the exceptions are reported concurrently. Monitoring capacity utilization of men and machines brings out inefficiency. Board of directors today direct their attention more on strategies of production, process, marketing, operational and financial planning. CMAs are amalgamation of a finance professional with a knowledge of engineer. CMAs can analyse these data deeper and provide better insights to the management for better decision making.