Risk Assurance and Internal Audit

How do you know  you are going to achieve your aims?

All organisations have goals, aims and objectives describing what’s important to you and where you want (or need) to move your organisation to as a result. 

Equally, all organisations also have various factors (risks) that will hinder the achievement of these goals, or may actually stop them being achieved at all. 

• Do you know exactly what will stop or hinder you? 
• Will you be able to overcome, side-step or ideally avoid these challenges altogether?
• Have you put the right measures in place to do this? 
• How do you know these will work in practice?
• How do you therefore know you are going to achieve your aims?

We can help you answer these questions.

In short, all organisations no matter what size, nature or sector can benefit from a greater focus on the challenges that will stop or hinder them achieving their aims. 

Just as importantly, to be successful, all organisations need to obtain assurance that their planned action, response or mitigation to these challenges will be effective in practice. 

Having a clearer idea about your risks and equally your ability to react to these is rapidly becoming a more explicit requirement across both the public and private sector alike. 

Moreover, it’s just sensible business! 

Spotting and side-stepping potential problems before they impact you will help make you more successful, more efficient and keep your costs down.

We can offer you a number of areas of support, providing pragmatic, solution-focussed, clear and easily understood advice. We’ll provide you with assurance that everything you think is being done “on the ground” to stop your risks becoming a reality actually is happening in practice!

We can help you by:

• Working with you to assess and strengthen how you monitor, manage and steer your business;
• Helping you reinforce your risk management, governance and internal control environment;
• Providing training, advice and related support to boards, audit committees and senior teams to enable and evolve your own assurance frameworks, so you know how well you are mitigating risks in practice;
• Delivering the more traditional core internal audits of risks and controls – from pure internal compliance to wider risk-based, assurance focussed audits;
• Carrying out more bespoke specific advisory reviews to help you answer particular questions, for example to demonstrate regulatory or contractual compliance in practice, or focussing on the efficiency or effectiveness of one of your functions or services;
• Helping set-up or tailor your risk register/maps, widening this out to fuller assurance “stocktakes” / mapping, facilitating risk workshops and training, implementing and strengthening your organisation-wide risk management systems, processes and culture;
• Providing wider governance advisory reviews, including reviews of effectiveness, structure, reporting, culture and accountability, as well as tailored training for your board, audit committee and management team. We also provide sector specific training - for example, tailored for academies, charities, trustees

Please do get in touch if you would like to discuss how any aspect of this above relates to your organisation.