Proceedings

corporate governance framework, so internal audit should become more active,
playing a significant role as one of the key role players in the effectiveness of
managing businesses (Paape, 2003; Allen 2008). The expectations of management
and board of directors and not only from the chief internal auditor and his department
are strongly increasing. It’s become absolutely necessary for the internal auditors to
develop a global vision over the key elements of corporate governance, looking for
solutions that could ensure the enhancing of their activities and their skills and
abilities for the assessment and monitoring of those key elements, in order to ensure
the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms.
Also, the global economic crisis that strongly affected the world economy starting
with 2008 was another reason that put the light over the real added value provided by
internal audit, especially in the context of corporate governance and risk management.
From the beginning of global economic crisis, there were many organisms and
organisations that tried to identify the major factors as being determinant in issuing
this economic crisis. A report realized by a group of seven supervisory agencies like
the French Banking Commission, the German Federal Financial Supervisory
Authority, the Swiss Federal Banking Commission, the U.K. Financial Services
Authority, and, in the United States, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency,
the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
(Senior Supervisors Group, 2008) emphasized the weakness and shortcomings of risk
management and its failure in the in the process of identifying and effective
management of various groups of risks, due to an increasing complexity of services
offered and because of risky nature of business conducted as a relevant negative factor
that was determinant in issuing the present economic crisis.
The impact of such factors like weak management and inefficient corporate
governance was also underlined at the European Conference on Corporate
Governance (8th European Corporate Governance Conference), held in Stockholm in
December 2009, where it had been given important critics to the audit function about
its weakness and ineffectiveness in fighting against to a poor corporate governance
and against to a weak risk management process. In this context, the role of internal
audit should be to provide a reasonable assurance over the effectiveness of risk
management. But it is not internal audit’s responsibility to take some actions response
in order to face the negative risks identified. So, internal audit is not responsible to
implement the action response to prevent the identified risks, but its main
responsibility is to provide to management relevant reports over the assessment of key
risks and the effectiveness of all these categories of risks (Leech, 2008).
The above were presented only few factors that increased the pressures over internal
audit function to look for developing of a set of good audit practices, especially in the
context of corporate governance, so internal audit to be able to prove its quality of real
added value provider. The investigation over the auditor’s perception over the good
audit practices could provide a significant starting point in developing such a
framework that could integrate relevant internal audit practices, especially in the
context of the necessity to improve those audit practices within an emergent economy
like the Romanian one.
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