Audit Approach

Whether you are part of the University of Missouri’s four educational campuses or MU Health Care, our commitment to you is simply to assist you in achieving your organizational objectives by taking the right level of the right risks. We do this through our audit approach, which begins with risk assessment and ends with risk analysis. The key in every step along the way is your active involvement with us. Your knowledge and expertise is the ingredient for ensuring the work we do will have a positive impact on your operations and achievement of objectives. Following are specific examples of how your active involvement with us are welcome.

Risk Assessment

Managing our risks is important to fully realize the opportunities we have as an organization. These opportunities are expressed in our objectives, whether these are strategic; operational; patient care or compliance oriented. Risk assessment is about thinking from the perspective what will inhibit or delay us in achieving our objectives? We rely on your understanding of your strategy, operations and external environment as a critical input in assessing risk. One result of the risk assessment process is focusing our internal audit resources on the most critical risk areas for the achievement of organizational objectives. This is expressed in the Audit Plan.

Audit Performance

If we are performing an audit in one of your areas of responsibility your active engagement with us will result in a product that can positively impact your unit’s ability to achieve its objectives.

• Planning – In this phase of our work we are reviewing any information that will assist us in defining the purpose and scope of the internal audit. You can be a valuable part of this phase by providing us requested information and suggesting any other relevant documents we may not be aware of. As part of the planning phase we will have an audit kick-off meeting and look to you to help determine who should be involved. At this meeting we will discuss a proposed objective and scope for the work. This will be your opportunity to share with us any concerns you have, ask questions, and make suggestions before the objectives and scope of the work are finalized.
• Field Work – As we perform our audit procedures we will keep you apprised of results and observations. We ask that you review the work and engage with us to ensure root cause is identified and begin considering management actions plans to correct any major issues. We understand resources are limited and our promise to you is a focus on critical issues for resolution, not additional busy work that adds no appreciable improvement to performance.
• Reporting – We want our reports to be to the point and actionable. Your review of the draft is vital to ensuring this. As part of this phase we will work with you to reach agreeable management action plans. We, like you, want the best solution to address the issues identified.
• Follow-up – Once an action plan has been agreed to with a timeline for implementation we are relying on you to build that solution into your operational workflow. We will circle back with you shortly after the due date for implementation to assess the actions you have taken. This may involve some testing to gauge effectiveness for addressing the audit issue.

Risk Analysis

To complete the loop we update our risk assessment with information we have learned from each audit performed. To keep pace with the speed of business a continuous assessment of emerging risks and a dynamic audit plan that can shift to address the most critical areas in a timely manner is essential. Each of you, as leaders of your area, are needed if we are to realize the success we envision for our students, patients, and communities.

Consulting Engagements

Are you embarking on a process redesign, selection of IT tools or software, an organizational change to your areas of responsibility? You can involve us in a consulting engagement to assist in research, data collection, strategic thinking, process redesign, or any other way our skill set, experience and disciplined approach to assessment and evaluation will provide you an extra set of hands or objective set of eyes. In a consulting engagement you determine the objectives and scope of our work. There is no formal audit report and no cost to you or your team for our services. Please give us a call if you feel we can be of value to you.