Fly, High

The main agenda of the seminar was Audit Practice and Risk Management of the ING Group. Last day, an independent auditor from ING group held a class with this topic. Because I worked at the ING as an intern, I could understand his saying more easily. The charts, diagram, and most of data in the presentation material were accustomed to me.

At the last point of the presentation, he talked about basic concept of ‘Soft Audit’. It is not yet spread to audit world. Most of senior auditors are even unfamiliar with this concept. Original starting point regarding soft audit is from this question. “Can we audit people’s mind?” You may think this sound likes a joke. But what I was surprised is that the feasibility of the soft audit is going to real. Actually, the ING’s risk management practice described a way to audit people’s mind systematically.

The main way to start soft audit is similar with usual audit. It is start from giving questions to people, too. What a different thing is, toss question about their feeling, real thinking against processes, compliance, forgery etc. Not about real good process is built but giving them a question whether the controls are really exists or not following their opinion.

The assessment method of audit result is concise, too. Calculate percentage of positive and negative answer. If positive answer is higher than certain point of negative one, we see that the control is working well. That was all about soft audit. Do you think this is too easy? I don’t think so. The soft audit mechanism is still in its infancy even in the ING’s risk management. It’s because the people’s mind should be set in advance. All of the people in such an organization have to be determined for process, control improvement. That’s difficult.