Internal Audit Quality: A Polysemous Notion? The Contrasted Viewpoints of External Auditors, Audit Committee Members, Internal Auditors and the Institute of Internal Auditors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to characterize how those who perform (internal auditors), mandate (audit committee members), use (audit committee members and external auditors) and normalize (the Institute of Internal Auditors) internal audit work respectively make sense of the notion of “internal audit quality”. We collected rarely researched qualitative data, including 56 interviews with internal auditors and audit committee members of public or para-public sector organizations in Canada and archival documents published by the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) and analyzed in the light of framing theory (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow and Benford 1988). We delineate four interpretative schemes (or frames), called “manager”, “eminence grise”, “professional”, and “watchdog”. Each suggests radically different perspectives on the nature of internal auditors’ work – a detached professional endeavor or an engaged managerial activity? – and its quality – signaled by the careful selection of the “right” work inputs to warrant independence and competence throughout the audit, by the perceived usefulness of the audit report in helping the top manager make informed decisions or by the audit process’ compliance with professional standards and norms. Our findings have important implications for the types of quality controls deemed suitable to internal audit work, from input controls to throughput, output and/or disciplinary controls. Highlighting the contrast between these frames is important because so far extant literature has focused predominantly on only one perspective on internal audit quality, that of external auditors. We increase extant literature by suggesting that internal audit quality is more polysemous and complex than previously acknowledged.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".