[Music] foreign [Music] excited to have somebody from not Denver Colorado visiting with us today I have Stacy Lynch who is actually in Phoenix Arizona here uh to talk about this next subject and she's actually going to do another subject a few modules down the road as well so Stacy let's just kick it off can you tell the students a little bit about yourself maybe your education your career background and certainly where you work today and what you do sure well yeah so I'm Stacy Lynch I am one of the Deputy City Auditors for the City of Phoenix um I have been with the city for about 17 years previous to the city I worked in the financial industry was a stay-at-home mom different hodgepodge of things but um had a friend that worked in the city audit department they said you'd be great at it I applied and I've never left um a lot of people say when you come to work it for the city there's the golden handcuffs of the pension um and then the city audit Department it's just such a fun place to work if that makes sense but um for my education I have my bachelor's degree in Business Administration and I also have my masters of public administration and I do have several audit related certifications I'm a certified internal auditor um a certified Information Systems auditor so lots of Education I'm very supportive of education but my husband said I can't get my doctorate because he's not going to call me doctor so I love it well I think we've already we've had one of our guest speakers lifelong kind of learning was their advice or tip to students so I like that you kind of do that as well and support that as well yeah any fun facts about yourself that you would want to share with the students before we jump in um I probably have an unhealthy Obsession to documentaries anytime I say something about oh I saw this on TV my co-workers my friends they know it was a documentary um and that probably should have let me know my career should have been an audit because I'm all about obtaining information now granted a lot of them are Dateline mysteries so if anything happens to my husband I've studied up on it and I probably can get away with it I love it he better be scared you know so you and I both have a passion for documentaries that's probably why we get along so well because I'm always looking for those good fraud ones so yes oh awesome well we are here to talk about communicating and mainly communicating our audit engagement results so we have already as a class talked about how do we plan for an engagement how do we per actually perform an engagement do that testing and I think you'll be such a great person uh to talk about the last stage which is communicating now we used to call this stage I feel like reporting because you know that's really what we do and I know you'll talk about that but I also like the fact that instead of always saying like planning field work reporting now we're doing kind of planning performance communicating because it's the action of what we're doing versus the the format which we're doing it if that makes sense um so I just wanted to kick off with really kind of more a high level question on what do you feel like is the biggest challenge in this area in this phase of our audit engagements of communicating I mean it's not just one thing unfortunately I think it you know I can take it from two different perspectives you know one is is making sure you know who your target audience is I mean are you talking to the CEO of the company the mayor of the Oregon City you work for or is it the you know person day-to-day person who's processing the invoices knowing your target audience in developing your communication approach that way I'm very passionate about the different you know books or courses you could take to effectively communicate with people and identifying based off of maybe their personality or their traits how you can Target your communication so they'll hear your message um you know because auditing there's a little bit of sales to it you know um we have to get their buy-in on potentially the audit recommendations we're going to be giving them we have to get them to trust us so that they tell us all the secrets we need to know um so knowing how to communicate with the different individuals knowing your target audience I think is one challenge um but as an auditor individually you know when I'm going through all of my results it's making sure that I've covered everything because I'm going to go in and perform an audit on Inventory management and I'm going to cover all these different bases and at the end I've got to summarize that myth information um so making sure I'm covering everything throughout the audit and I'm being transparent with the Oddity and letting them know this is what I'm seeing my understanding it correctly um because that's just going to make it a better product in the end so I think those are the two challenges that I see my staff having things challenges I've had throughout my career um so anything you can do through you know whether it's practice or classes you could take to improve in those areas I think it will help you yeah I love that and I love what you picked there I always used to interview audit staff and say how comfortable are you being a salesperson what sales experience do you have and they kind of look at you like you have free heads for a minute and then you explain that this is a lot of what we do and you know selling equals trust trust equals selling that whole like cycle is super important um so yeah I love that and your second tip what was going through my mind with not only being transparent in kind of what all we did and you know thorough when we're communicating what we did and the results of that it's also this fine balance of we want to create this concise you know very clear output that maybe doesn't always go into all the details so it's like you're kind of walking this fine line of you know and we're kind of getting into the communicating versus the method at which you're communicating which is really the next question I'd love for you to talk about um how your team communicates those audits so report audit finding so is it a report memo different formats depending on the type kind of go through that because I I think that's kind of the next the next big thing to talk about yeah you're right it definitely feeds right into it because you bring up the point about we do so much work as Auditors but then we've got to get it down into this concise message and I find that my staff and I have in the past we want to say in our audit reports or our memos this is everything I did but you really need to get to that point where it's like your two minute elevator speech if you run they tell you to practice in your career um but in our office we I expect communication throughout the entire project but when we get towards the end we're done we do have a more informal what we call an exit meeting where we're covering this is the objective of the audit this is what we found um we don't necessarily get into the point of talking about recommendations at that point I mean some of it's generally obvious if they were never locking the safe where the cash was stored we're going to give them a recommendation to do that um and then our staff go into the point where they're actually documenting it formally um so it could be a memo if it was what we call a non-audit service so you have your audits where maybe you have very strong criteria and then you have more of those Consulting engagements not audits so those typically are in a memo but if it's a traditional audit it's going to be in a full audit report where we're covering all of the information and then um we will issue that in a draft format the audit reports um because we want the city leadership to be able to look at it and make sure it's accurate and then we come together in a what we would call a closing meeting to get around the table make sure there's no typos make sure the information is accurate and it's at that point that we're talking about the audit recommendations and we're getting their concurrence on that um in some audit offices they cannot concur with a recommendation but in ours they're kind of forced to concur but that's why prior to in our Communications we're trying to get their buy-in so that by the time we get to the closeout meeting they should not be surprised on what we're telling them or what they read in the report yeah um yeah I know we'll talk about uh in the agile module is you know part of being agile is that you know it might not be as much as daily stand-up meetings with your audit clients but maybe weekly or you know I used to have my team write weekly summary emails at the end which was just very simply you know a simple format of here's what we accomplished this week here's what we found here's outstanding questions or or things we need from your team and it just really helped move that the project along and keep that constant communication throughout like you said exactly and working for a government body you know we have that special aspect that everything we do is public record so we do Post our audit reports to a public-facing website where the average citizen you yourself could go and read our work the only difference we have in some of those if it's a confidential audit to where the information we were going to be talking about the report could compromise the city so for example cyber security audits we don't want to air our dirty laundry because then the bad guys could use it against us so in those cases we just have a very Consolidated report um but I would like to see some different communication methods you know I've seen some audit shops that have Twitter accounts or they're doing podcasts so I think we have some room to grow but for now those are the methods we are taking yeah I think you brought up such a great point to distinguish government versus is you know a private or even a public entity who that report goes to so when Stacy started at the beginning a lot of the communicating and remembering your audience you know you really do based on the industry that you're in or the um you know the fields that you're working in you have to know what the audience is and it's very different for government it's everyone literally um the media can get a hold of it you know we've seen that over the years where they've poked at um you know a different city audit reports so um you you briefly kind of talked about how um you know maybe a cyber security audit would have different um you know components language it might be privileged or confidential uh or privileged and confidential what are the other components of a typical audit like Assurance report I know you know from my profession and my professional experience it's background you put in some scope um you're maybe your objective and then you get into your findings your recommendations sometimes it has action plans from management what do yours look like yeah a lot of those same elements um we've kind of um formatted our reports that again go to that targeted reader so we have a what we call the results in brief this is just two or three quick bullets and this is more for like the CEO the mayors of the organizations that just have a quick amount of time okay here's the what we saw very brief and then we go into that traditional executive summary where again it's just a little bit deeper and it keeps building into it um and then we have the each show the individual audit rep um audit observations and within that we're putting in key elements you know that background information and in our office we follow the federal government auditing standards yellow book and when we are reporting our results we have to include key elements that talk about you know what was the criteria what did we observe um you know what was the effect um of what we saw and then we have our audit recommendations that we include in there um at the point that our reports go out final our Oddity has already told us what they're going to do to remediate the issues we've identified so they have their action plan that they put together and they come up with their target dates so all of that information is available for anyone to see and then we have you know um maybe that you know legal wording in the back where we put some of the things in our report like what was the scope we looked at the time frame what were our methodologies that we took whether we did interviews or surveys or testing um we also include whether or not a statement on whether we found the data we used in our audit to be reliable if we don't find the data be reliable we need to call that out as a factor in that and then stating whether or not we followed the government auditing standards when we performed the project and nine times out of ten there's no issues there but there are those instances where we have to say where we didn't follow the auditing standards and those more aligned to where we did in a Consulting engagement versus a true audit I got it and I really like the way um you know I've seen more and more audit shops put more in kind of the back or an appendix because we want to focus on like you said the audience you want to have that executive summary at the beginning um how about ratings do you all rate yours this is something you know I think even the IIA standards which are changing right now um you know are going to maybe require that rating for you know overall not not only overall but then individual issues ratings do you guys do that today we don't but I definitely see value in that because as an um as a client who's trying to figure out what they're going to fix you would think they're going to focus on those quick wins well those are probably low risk areas typically um but no we haven't Incorporated that but I definitely see where that's something that like the Ia standards it makes sense that we do that yeah absolutely well um I you know I think what I want the students to get out of this is that communicating results can look and feel different regardless of where you work or depending on where you work um the report could be a report it could be a memo like you said there's there's shops doing video reports now I've seen um audit shops do some PowerPoint presentations instead of actually a formal word document so I do think this is one of those neat ways where the standards say we have to communicate our results but they're not as prescriptive on how we have to do that so I like that there's some some creativity we can bring in here but it does emphasize that verbal not only verbal communication but written communication are really important when it important when it comes to internal audit yeah we're definitely looking at some more creative approaches because a lot of times I mean an audit report you could be halfway through and it's time you know you're going to fall asleep because it's so boring so we're trying to incorporate a lot of you know infographics to tell the story and I'm talking Beyond just a pie chart to show it but how can we take this narrative and put it in a picture um so that the reader can get through it faster because our target audience is not only the government officials it's also the taxpayer the taxpayer may not have a college education so how can they and understand what's going on in their government um and you talk about the Powerpoints and that's something we're trying to do in our closeout meetings now because we just have a short amount of time with this you know senior leadership to be able to tell them what we saw and so would a PowerPoint make more sense so we're actually just starting to experiment with that and keeping in mind that it's a public record document so is it consistent with the report so I'll keep you up to speed on how that ends up turning out I was perfect um internal audit projects course it's now called risk assurance and advisory engagements at MSU Denver we audit the university and we do a PowerPoint presentation as kind of the main deliverable for that so you also do a report but honestly I'm more con more concerned with what that PowerPoint presentation because it does kind of live in infamy and go to the university leaders in the board so um if you are interested in that class that's what we do in there too so um but Stacy thank you so much for talking to us about communicating at our audit assurance or advisory findings and we look forward to seeing you in another session thank you for having me Joe