Evaluating Audit Findings - A Practical Approach

Dimitrios Charamis, General Counsel, PricewaterhouseCoopers Business Solutions, Greece

Audit findings evaluation is an important step in each and every audit report irrespective of the related industry or organization. Both Audit Committee, management and other stakeholders wish to receive accurate, timely, constructive and relevant information regarding audit findings. However, relevant research (Koutoupis, 2009) demonstrates that there are many complaints by both management and audit committee members as to the volume and the size of audit reports delivered to them by internal audit departments. Currently, the vast majority of the Internal Audit departments evaluate audit findings using a simple scale of High, Medium, Low Risk (importance) scale based on the prior experience of Internal Auditors. Even, big Audit forms (e.g. PwC) has adopted this approach in order to keep the things simple (PwC Internal Audit Services Manual, 2007).

Dimitrios Charamis BA (Honors), MSc is working as Senior Consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers Internal Audit Services, he is also a part-time lecturer for the Business Administration department of the higher Technological Educational Institute of Piraeus. Currently, he is an Audit PhD candidate at the University of Patras (Implementation of the International Accounting Principles and the Correlation with the U.S. G.A.A.P.). Dimitrios has been involved as a Senior in charge in a number of consulting and assurance projects and also provided extensive Internal Audit training courses to Internal Audit Staff of major Greek financial services organizations.

PricewaterhouseCoopers was established by the merger of PriceWaterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand companies. The new company is today the biggest independent organization in provision of business services worldwide. The aim of this merger was the creation of an international company providing assurance and business services that would offer integrated solutions to the complex problems and needs of its customers.