Audit Planning: A Risk-Based Approach

APPENDIX A

APPLYING AN RBAP DIAGNOSTIC TOOL

Each chapter of the book has described key aspects of risk-based audit planning and the implications for internal auditing in terms of providing a suitable audit cover. Various models have been developed to help explain some of the issues at hand. Each chapter has been prepared to isolate key issues and describe the way various factors are interrelated to form a picture of the entire audit-planning concept. The final chapter attempted to pull some of the main issues together in a holistic and integrated framework. Appendix A takes on board a great deal of the material from the main chapters and builds a comprehensive checklist that can be used by auditors to assess where they stand in terms of implementing risk-based audit planning. The checklist can be used as a general diagnostic tool, or benchmark, against which to judge the state of risk-based audit planning and decide whether any improvements to the existing arrangement are possible.

We start this appendix by setting out a comprehensive model that can be applied to risk-based audit planning in Figure A.1. Each aspect of this model is addressed by the 100-point checklist that follows the model. Note that each question on the checklist would have to be answered by referring to a further list of more detailed subsidiary questions, which should be prepared by users to suit both the context of the organization and the approach used by the audit department in question. It may also be necessary ...