OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES?

Rainer Lenz and David J. O'Regan, "The Global Internal Audit Standards: Old wine in new bottles?" The EDP Audit, Control, and Security Newsletter (EDPACS), 

Volume 69, Issue 3 (2024).

Available on an open access basis from the publisher, Taylor & Francis. 

In this paper, Dr. Rainer Lenz and I evaluate the Institute of Internal Auditors' revised professional standards, the Global Internal Audit Standards (GIAS). The GIAS were issued in January 2024 after a lengthy period of commentary on the exposure draft, and are to come into force in January 2025.

Rainer and I both take a critical look at the official discourse surrounding the GIAS, in particular the claim that the GIAS are essentially principles-based. Starting from different premises (Rainer focusing on the humane, behavioral aspects of internal auditing, while my emphasis is on the roles of logic and moral agency), we both reached similar conclusions that the issuance of the GIAS was a missed opportunity to truly transform the IIA's standards into principles. To quote from the paper: the GIAS "are now arranged by principles rather than arranged into principles. The principles in the IIA’s Standards serve primarily as classificatory headings, and the majority of the text consists, as in the past, of a bloated inventory of rules and requirements" (p22, emphasis in original). 

We deploy the metaphor of old wine in new bottles to reflect a missed opportunity to move the IIA's standards away from a prescriptive, catechism-like document towards a principles-based approach. The danger of the prescriptive approach is that it narrows practitioners' horizons, both judgmental and moral, reducing internal auditing into the area of technical proficiency rather than the domain of accomplished professionals.  

The paper has generated a flurry of translation activity, and I am pleased to report that the following translations have already appeared (with the LinkedIn profiles of the translators provided):

Bosnian - by Anesa Bajric

Farsi - by Bita Mashayekhi

French - by Hervé Gloaguen

German - by Thomas Schwalb

Greek - by Professor Andreas G. Koutoupis

Hindi - by Girish Jain

Polish - by Dr. Joanna Przybylska

Spanish - by Bruno Flores

Turkish - by Metin Seren Akinci

Vietnamese - by Tan Hong Dang 

Please refer to the growing list of the paper's translations, and links to the translations themselves, on Rainer's website.

I thank Rainer, affectionately known among his friends and peers as the "Gardener of Governance",  for his collaboration with me in this paper, and Dan Swanson for accepting the paper for publication.

And I thank Alexander Ruehle of zapliance for funding open access for the paper.