Having spent the bulk of his career in the National Audit Office (NAO), the body charged with assessing departments and public bodies from the outside, Chris Wobschall is now an inside man, leading the government’s professional grouping of internal auditors. Appropriately enough, he works from the Treasury, where his day job as head of financial reporting policy ties in neatly with his head of profession function. From that berth, he’s keen to build the profile of internal auditors as officials with a part to play in high-level policy discussions, not just the monitoring of routine business practices. “What I’m trying to do is move internal audit up the ladder, from being concerned with low-level controls to engaging with the strategic risks [in] policy delivery,” he says.

Wobschall offers payroll management as an example of a “routine control” that he would like government auditors to spend less time on. “This [work] could include an audit of the separation of duties in a payroll system to make sure that the people authorising payments are not the ones deciding how much is paid, and also not the ones putting names on the payroll,” he explains. “That’s very low-level and the sort of thing that management should [already] have well controlled. Internal audit shouldn’t be very much involved with it, but sometimes they are.”

The head of profession is much more excited by the auditing of policy plans and options, with auditors involved in quality assurance and risk management as early as possible in discussions with policy colleagues. “When the government has a new policy, [internal auditors should be asking] what is the strategy? What is the objective? What are the controls in place to handle risk?” It follows that internal auditors should also be well-integrated with the project and programme managers (PPMs) overseeing delivery. Early involvement with policy and PPM officials means auditors will do more than simply articulate obvious flaws once a policy or project has already gone wrong – a criticism frequently levelled against Wobschall’s former colleagues in the NAO. “It’s about getting internal auditors in when you are running a project and advising on the risks and controls that are pertinent, rather than coming along later and bayoneting the wounded by saying: ‘You’ve done it all wrong’.”

 Like many of the heads of profession we’ve spoken to, Wobschall is keen to encourage people from diverse backgrounds to migrate into and out of the profession, and points out that a specific auditing qualification is only necessary for someone overseeing a formal audit. As well as auditors accredited by the professional body, the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), the profession also includes those with qualifications in accountancy and other recognised financial management credentials. Wobschall himself trained as an accountant, not an internal auditor.

What’s more, he wants more generalists from the fast stream to spend time in internal auditing. “If you are in a big private sector company like BP and you want to find out about the company, the way you do it is through a spell in internal audit,” he says. “At the moment, if you come in as a high-flying civil servant you do not normally spend a time in internal audit; it’s not an obvious place to go. I would like to see internal audit become a desirable place to go.” He stresses that those with leadership ambitions should not associate internal auditing with simply poring over spreadsheets. “You learn about interviewing, about interrogation, you learn analytical skills, interpersonal skills; you have to deal with people all the time. You also learn influencing skills and the discipline of report writing – all things that are useful for civil servants.”

Put simply, he says, he wants “more churn” – more internal auditors entering and leaving the civil service; after all, there’s a large pool of potential recruits among the private sector auditors working on government contracts. “We don’t get enough churn at the moment,” he says. “There’s a lot of outsourcing going on and that’s healthy because it brings in wider experience, but it also makes you wonder why we can’t grow more of our own internal auditors inside the civil service.”

However, as in many of government’s less developed professional groupings, one of the most pressing challenges for Wobschall is getting hard data on how many civil servants fall within his profession. This year has seen the publication of a new set of standards for government internal auditing and the development of a newsletter for the profession – but while surveys have suggested there are around 2,000 internal auditors, these figures are far from watertight.

“We reckon there are about 2,000 internal auditors – that probably includes contracted-out staff – and maybe that’s costing £200m,” he says. “But these are ‘guesstimates’ at the minute.”

Who are they? And what do they do?

Who are they?
Internal auditors work in all government departments, agencies and public bodies – usually dedicated solely to that function, but occasionally also having responsibility in areas such as project and programme management.

What do they do?
According to the professional body, internal auditors offer “an independent, objective assurance and consulting activity designed to add value and improve an organisation’s operations”. Internal auditors scrutinise performance in a wide range of areas, including organisational efficiency, financial reporting and compliance with laws and regulations.

Number crunching

In 2005 internal audit was first recognised as a discrete profession within government
An estimated 2,000 internal auditors work across government
£200m is the approximate cost of internal auditing within government
In January 2009 Chris Wobschall took over from Chris Butler as head of internal audit profession
In April 2009 updated government standards for internal auditing were published
Four key characteristics of the internal auditing profession are set out in the standards document: integrity, objectivity, confidentiality and competency
In March 2007 a new internal audit competency framework was published
Seven core competencies are laid out in the competency framework
160,000 internal auditors exist globally, according to professional body the Institute of Internal Auditors
83 per cent of internal auditors would recommend their job as a career, according to a survey conducted by the IIA in 2007