Recommendation Brief for an Internal Auditor
Jennifer Perkins
December 9, 2013
ACC 544
Tracie Youngblood

An internal auditor certifies a company’s financial statements are timely, relevant, and reliable. According to the American Accounting Association (1973), “Auditing is a systematic process of objectivity obtaining and evaluating evidence regarding assertions about economic actions and events to ascertain the degree of correspondence between the assertions and established criteria and communicating the results to interested users.” Internal auditing assists a company minimize business risks by satisfying the demand of timely, relevant, and reliable information. The following are four environmental conditions that increase user demand for relevant and reliable information: (1) Complexity, (2) Remoteness, (3) Time sensitivity, and (4) Consequences.
Complexity
Currently, transactions and events are far more complex, in a way that decision makers and investors do not have the expertise to handle them. However, a professional such as an internal auditor is trained to accumulate, gather, and sum up the crucial operating information on his or her own. An internal auditor has the expertise to break down the complex transactions and events while making that information more understandable for the decision making process.
Remoteness
Decision makers and potential partners are often separated by distance, time, and a lack of expertise. Depending on the distance and time, investors cannot continually check up on their investments. Often the investor must hire professionals such as internal auditors to do the work for him or her.
Time Sensitivity
In today’s fast pasted economy, decision makers do not have the time to wait six months for the disclosure of relevant information. Decision makers often need the information on a moment’s notice that a