Available Delivery Methods
Course Length: One or Two Days
An audit report is an opportunity to help management assess operations, decipher numbers, and analyze controls. If written well, the report is a powerful tool for improvement. However, too many audit reports fall short because of inconsistent formats, redundancies, and difficulty synthesizing the writing styles of audit personnel. These reports fail to crystalize issues and fail to provide clear recommendations for improvement.
The Clear Audit Report Writing workshop provides internal auditors with a process to improve organization, clarity, and conciseness of audit findings and reports. The interactive training includes practical exercises on drafting, revising, and proofreading; a peer-review session; and lecture related to best practices for audit reports.
- Target writing based on what management and the audit committee need to know
- Implement techniques to show significance of issues to management
- Improve clarity and conciseness of observations and executive summaries
Topics
- Planning the right level to detail based on report purpose and audience
- Checking the five Ws for complete and concrete content
- Crafting observations using five components: condition, criteria, effect, cause, and recommendation
- Strengthening audit comments using six key criteria
- Free-writing drafts to increase writing speed and flow
- Revising for readability, clarity, and conciseness
- Varying the length and structure of sentences for an engaging style
- Using active voice and parallelism to clarify writing
- Proofreading for perfection
Rave Reviews
“Very relevant information. Just left another internal audit department that needs the same support. Will recommend it!” – Merri-Lou Perkins, Dow Chemical
“Barry is very clear in his presentation and very experienced in the topic.” – Kam Chin Wong, OCBC Bank of Singapore
“Great course! I would have liked three days of this!” – Bill Fasoli, Varian Medical Systems
“Interactive, fun, and easy to remember the material. Very enjoyable!” – Rick Bernie, Dow Chemical
“Will influence my division to adopt [Barry’s] approach.” Robert Yeung, OCBC
“Thank you for the information provided during the course of the workshop. It was refreshing to have a professional communication expert to have the knowledge on how to write audit reports.” – Julie Betts, Canada Border Service Agency
“Very effective and efficient course. Even after being an auditor for more than 20 years, I still learnt a lot from him.” – Head of Audit, OCBC – Singapore