Are you responsible for completing 🧐audit requests🧐? Are you or your team gathering the data 📑📊 requested by Compliance Auditors or Examiners? After two decades of preparing data for audits, exams, and compliance reports, I have learned a lot along the way. 🤦
As I grew up the ranks and was able to hire and manage others, I realized they too were making the same mistakes 😱I had made, even my experienced hires . To reduce the learning curve 📉, I created a checklist ✅they could use prior to delivering audit deliverables. This not only helped them raise 📈 the bar of performance, but it drove their credibility. People knew they could trust 👫 the deliverables of my team, and in Compliance that means a lot. In fact, it made my team the go-to team 🙌 when anything important was needed. This was great 🌟visibility for the team.
Things to Remember Before Submitting:
👀1 COMPREHENSION – Verify Request Details – Read the request multiple times before and after gathering the data to ensure accuracy.
⌛️ 2 COMPLETENESS – Validate with other sources – Check Your Data before handing it off; search for nulls, blanks, gibberish, truncation, test records, duplicates, encoding issues. Validate.
💯3 ACCURACY – Check for nulls, blanks, truncation – Run Summary Stats on columns, find fields with < or > than avg character counts, & review to understand the differences.
⚖️ 4 INTEGRITY – Join all data sets and validate – If multiple data sets, sharing a primary key, will be provided, join them & verify data’s accuracy & completeness (e.g., spurious tuples, missing or orphaned records). Validate & Repair Query.
📆 5 CONTINUITY – Compare prior year deliverables – Review deliverables from prior year & compare to identify, understand & validate differences.
🔮 6 BE PREEMPTIVE- Review data thru their eyes – What do you think you auditors are looking for? Search for it, and see what you find.
💬 7 TRANSPARENCY – Disclose failures upfront – Summarize exposure, mitigants, net risk, & next steps. (And, never assume your smarter than your auditor. This will set you up for failure.)
🌈 8 PARTNERSHIP – Work with Audit to reduce risk – Audit can be your greatest partner as well as your biggest supporter. Help them understand your program and underlying rationale so, they can help you remove your blinders and ultimately lead to successful exams.
Pls add your 🦄 tips, advice, and stories in the comments. I am sure we all have stories of those moments when we realized a file was truncated, there were encoding issues, someone provided “Mickey Mouse” 🐭 test records in the batch.
Hope you enjoyed this and find it helpful!
Have a great weekend!!
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