Follow-up Audits
Follow-up of audit reports is part of the audit process. It is an important tool to strengthen an audit’s impact. The priority of follow-up tasks should be assessed as part of an audit office’s overall audit strategy.
Sufficient time should be allowed for audited organizations to implement action plans. As with all audit work, when conducting follow-up of audit reports, auditors adopt an unbiased and independent approach. The focus should be to determine whether actions taken on audit findings and recommendations remedy the underlying deficiencies.
A decision auditors take in conducting follow-up audits is the desired level of assurance. At a high level or audit level of assurance, the audit planning and procedures must be as rigorous as the original audit. While the auditor may have already developed a sufficient knowledge of business to conduct the audit, they must still undertake the planning steps of obtaining management’s acknowledgement of responsibility, objectives, and criteria. As well, the audit procedures need to be sufficiently robust to obtain sufficient appropriate evidence.
A high-level assurance assignment to follow up on a gender equality audit that is only a few years old may stretch an audit office’s resources. Many offices have a policy of using review-level assurance for follow-up engagements. In a gender equality audit, this would imply restricting the audit to the findings and recommendations of the original audit, updating quantitative information on performance with limited audit tests. This review level of assurance is designed to inform audited organizations on progress without all of the rigour associated with the original audit. Auditors are asserting that, based on the limited procedures, the reported progress is plausible.
In some instances auditors will not provide any assurance in the follow-up report. In effect, this means that auditors are merely reporting what management has asserted about progress.
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