A matter of semantics - Letter to the Editor

Internal Auditor, Oct, 2003 by Tony Ridley

Congratulations! The August issue of Internal Auditor was the best yet! It was refreshing to read a board and shareholder perspective on corporate governance in the interview with Mervyn King, as opposed to the public accounting dominated perspective we hear in the United States. Bob McDonald's views on our profession, as chairman of The IIA and as a government auditor, will go a long way in responding to the debate in recent issues of the magazine. And, the professional guidance section highlighting the compatibility between IIA and the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) independence standards should resolve many of the misconceptions that have been published in that debate.

The question of consulting services being provided by internal auditors seems to be one that will not go away. Consulting does not have a negative connotation in general but only as applied to the public accounting profession that used consulting as a way to improve margins because its main product line had become a commodity.

The IIA's Guidance Task Force was never totally happy with the word consulting to describe the many noncompliant services we perform. It was used in the Professional Practices Framework for two reasons: one we could not come up with a better word, and two, we wanted our definition and standards to be understood by our customers. The suggestion by the GAO to change the word to constructive engagement would leave a lot of glassy eyes in boardrooms and senior management offices. We will only enhance our profession by getting away from "audit speak" and using terms that our customer base understands, defining consulting for internal auditors rather than having to define constructive engagement to our customers.

When the definition was exposed, many government auditors were concerned about the divergence of internal auditing from the public accounting view of the world. In discussions regarding using the word consulting, many government auditors told me they were providing the type of service that the new definition pro posed. Let's get away from semantics and get to the heart of the issue, the modern definition of control is not accounting control, and any internal auditor--government or otherwise--who is focused only on accounting control is not providing adequate service to their customers.

TONY RIDLEY, CIA

Chairman, IIA Professional Practices

Framework Guidance Task Force

ridleys@comcast.net

Please send letters to Internal Auditor, 247 Maitland Ave., Altamonte Springs, FL 32701-4201, USA; fax 1-407-830-4832; or e-mail editor@thelia.org. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.