07 June 2023 
Jemma Biernat, Membership Officer
Message from the Chair
As we approach the end of the academic year, our thoughts may be turning to the prospect of summer holidays, whether that means idling by the pool in some sun-drenched destination, taking part in some action packed adventure in a far flung corner of the globe, or reflecting and relaxing closer to home. Or our focus may be on that final push to deliver the planned programme of audits before the close of the year and to get next year’s programme approved.
Wherever your thoughts lie, allow yourself to be distracted by the following items before getting back to planning your summer.
Save the date – CHEIA Conference 2023
For those who missed this news in March, a further reminder that the CHEIA Conference 2023 is scheduled for Wednesday – Thursday 6th – 7th September. Once again this will be on-line, allowing more people to participate and to fit this event into their busy schedules.
The programme is close to being finalised and we are looking forward to the return of some familiar faces on our speaker list as well as new voices on a broad range of topics including student mental health and artificial intelligence.
The programme, prices and booking details will be announced very soon. Watch this space.
Global Internal Audit Standards – Consultation
Thanks to those who participated in our round table discussions on the consultation draft proposed by the IIA. The consensus view was that while there were positives in the structure of the standards into five domains, the inclusion of guidance materials suggesting how conformance might be generated resulted in a bloated document. This made it more difficult to identify the requirements from the ‘nice to haves’ and in some cases, proposed that we turned back time and reinstituted some bureaucracy and paper based controls as evidence that we are behaving properly! It was felt that in future EQA’s there could be huge scope for disagreement with assessors if some elements of the indicators of conformance were not present, even if there were alternative means of demonstrating conformance that are perhaps not reflected in the guidance.
A submission has now been made to Global IIA and we can now only wait to see how they respond, noting that there has been considerable public comment on platforms such as LinkedIn that makes similar points.
BiteSize – Geopolitical Risk Management
Is this a risk for your University? If it is, register for the BiteSize event taking place on Thursday 15th June 2023 at 11:00am on Microsoft Teams. If it is not recognised as a risk, perhaps it ought to be which is all the more reason to register and to find out more. Details are on the CHEIA website under Events.
Quality Assessments – the Spider
This is a final call for those who would like to take part in the 2023 round of peer moderated quality assessments using the CHEIA Spider. We shall be forming the peer groups in the week commencing 19th June, so contact david.williamson@uws.ac.uk by Friday 16th June if you haven’t done so already. Please indicate any preferences for when you would like the peer group to meet and reporting deadlines as this is helpful in determining who is part of each group (this applies to those who have already registered an interest).
If you are planning to use the Spider for an internal assessment only, please also let David know – part of the process involves a brief survey in which we collect summary results which are aggregated to provide a simple benchmark.
Forums
And finally, don’t forget about the CHEIA forums for Heads of Internal Audit, Practitioners and the Cyber IT and Digital (CITD) Group. The frequency and timing of meetings may be flexed slightly over the summer months, but these remain important in maintaining contact with peers across the sector, sharing ideas and resources, and providing encouragement. For further information, contact the convenors of the relevant groups.
