The Top 5 Blogs for Current and Future CIA® Professionals
Whether you are preparing for the Certified Internal Auditor ® (CIA) exam or are working as an internal auditor, it helps to keep pace with the industry’s best ideas and best practices. Fortunately, there’s some good reading online to keep you interested. Here are five blogs designed for current and future CIAs.
Richard Chambers, president and CEO of the Institute of Internal Auditors, has four decades of experience as an auditor and nearly a full alphabet’s worth of letters behind his name (CIA, QIAL, C GAP, CCSA, CRMA) to show for it. He writes this lively blog that looks at current events—e.g. “deflategate,” the FIFA scandal, Uber and disruptive innovation—from the perspective of an internal auditor. He manages to create suspense and tell a great story, whiles teaching readers about risk controls, communication, and other hot topics in the world of internal auditing.
Start with: What the Most Popular Posts From the Past Year Tell Us About Internal Audit is an engaging overview of some of Chambers’ best recent work, and will definitely give you a sense of his writing.
This blog is only about a year old and lives on the site of Walters Kluwer Financial Services, a risk and compliance software solutions provider. The blog itself seems designed to be a place where professional internal auditors can talk shop, “regardless of the size of your team and the software solutions you are using to complete your work,” writes blogger Toby DeRoche, a CIA and MBA. DeRoche worked in many internal audit departments throughout his career before advising other organizations on audit software. Other bloggers contribute to the site, and the content goes beyond software to offer practical tips on topics such as presentations, surveys, analytics, and the how to incorporate elusive and ever-changing risk into your audits.
Start with: Welcome to the Thinking Like an Auditor Blog will get you started and give you a sense of future topics DeRoche might cover in the future.
3. Risk3sixty
IT auditors flock to this popular information risk management blog, which also publishes in-depth whitepapers on topics like data breaches, website security hardening and cyber and vendor security. Founders Christian Hyatt, CIASA, CISM, and Shane Peden, CISA, MBA, MSCE, have big corporate credentials (Hyatt works at business consultant HA&W, Peden works at Grant Thornton LLP, both in Atlanta) and attempt to go beyond the surface to get at the how-tos and whys of everyday decisions around software and data risk.
Start with: The Guide to IT Auditing, which is designed to be everything the authors wish they had when starting in internal audit.
4. Norman Marks on Governance, Risk Management, and Audit
Officially retired from the profession as of 2013, Marks literally wrote the book on Internal Audits. In fact, he wrote four of them: World-Class Risk Management, World-Class Internal Audit, Management’s Guide to Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404, and How Good Is Your GRC?. Marks is also a speaker, a consultant and a mentor, and this blog is one of the most thoughtful and thorough for practicing auditors. You can also find Marks blogging for the IIA, active on Twitter @normanmarks, and generally acting as a thought leader for the profession. (He even offers to answer your questions directly.)
Start with: All of Marks’ posts are intriguing reads, but Misunderstanding Risk and Internal Audit is an interesting place to start.
5. Robert Half Finance and Accounting Blog
Sure, it’s produced by a large recruiting firm, and it gathers about as much content from other sources as it produces originally, but it’s a great source for articles and advice targeted to accountants and auditors. An even better reason to read this blog is for its general business best practices, including salary negotiation and job training tips, small business accounting and employee retention—even how to listen to music at work without annoying coworkers.
Start with: Attributes of the Ideal 21st Century Internal Auditor, culled from a more extensive Institute of Internal Auditors report on the seven habits of highly effective internal auditors, it will give you a sense of the important skills to develop in the profession.
Do you have any blogs you love to read? If so, be sure to share them in the comments below.