Internal Audit

Mission and Objectives

Our objectives include the following:

• Enhancing the financial health of the City and providing stewardship of its resources
• Supporting/working with management to improve the city’s operations, identify areas where cost could be saved, and assure management of the efficiency and effectiveness of government programs/activities.
• We shall also provide independent assurance to management on the existence, efficiency, and effectiveness of the city’s internal control system through our various control monitoring and testing activities.
• The internal audit unit shall also provide consulting services to management: training in areas around risk assessment, internal control assessment, and other advisory services on the agency’s programs.
• Doing all of these and many others aims at assisting and supporting organizational units in achieving their goals and objectives.

Ordinances, Authority and Responsibilities

The internal audit unit is a division under the Finance department. This function was established by the City’s Code of Ordinances section 4.02(3).

As part of the unit’s authority, it shall audit any of the City’s organization unit (agency) identified in its audit plan/program, approved by the City’s Common Council.

In addition, the Code of Ordinances also empowers the internal audit unit to have full access to any books, records, notes, memoranda, or other documents maintained by any organizational unit (agency) relating to its expenditures, revenues, operations, etc. These documents shall be requested and reviewed only for the purpose of audit and not otherwise.

At the end of each audit engagement, the unit shall submit a report including the audit objectives, details of the test performed, findings/observations, recommendations for improvement, management implementation plans for each finding, etc.

Please note that the internal audit report is a public document and shall be uploaded on the Finance department webpage for public access. In addition, internal audit will support the agency’s management in the implementation process but will not implement the recommendation on behalf of any agency, i.e., the internal audit will not perform responsibilities expected to be performed by the management.

Standards

The Department adheres to the Government Auditing Standards, 2011 Revision (the “Yellow Book”) promulgated by the Comptroller General of the United States. These standards, referred to as generally accepted government auditing standards, “pertain to auditors’ professional qualifications, the quality of audit effort, and the characteristics of professional and meaningful audit reports.”

Code of Ethics

Government Auditing Standards (GAS 1.12) states "Conducting audit work in accordance with ethical principles is a matter of personal and organizational responsibility. Ethical principles apply in preserving auditor independence, taking on only work that the auditor is competent to perform, performing high-quality work, and following the applicable standards cited in the audit report.