Interim Chief Audit Executive — Assurance Recovery

Sequencing assurance so the committee can act on it

A list of audit findings is not an assurance agenda. Findings arrive with different severities, from different reviews, written in different vocabularies, and an audit committee confronted with all of them at once can do little except note them. The Interim Chief Audit Executive's job, over 24 months and answering to the Audit Committee Chair, is to turn findings into a sequence: what must be fixed first, what can wait, what will be formally accepted, and who is answerable for each.

The role carries executive authority over internal audit and the control agenda. You will set out who owns which controls, including which thresholds local leaders retain, and decide the evidence the audit committee uses to oversee investment, capacity and controls. On assurance grounds, each inherited commitment is yours to send forward, pause or stop. Proposals that push cost or risk elsewhere with no accountable executive will be halted, and investment cases that ignore take-up, dependencies or downside declined. You will approve the escalation route and resolve disputes between the Audit Committee Chair and the operators before funds are released.

An internal audit leader in a subsidiary also serves two audiences: the local committee and the group's own assurance function. The best ones keep both fully informed without letting either set the other's priorities, and they treat a well-argued risk acceptance as a legitimate outcome rather than a failure to remediate.

Twenty-four months from triage to a self-sustaining function

In the first ninety days every open control finding should be mapped to an owner, and the audit committee should have agreed the order in which they will be addressed. Around month nine the priority findings should be either closed or formally accepted with reasons, and assurance results should be reaching the committee on a fixed cycle. By month 24 a rebuilt internal audit function, with successors in place, should be delivering the assurance plan without interim support.

An audit leader who builds the team that follows

Assurance leadership across a business with revenue of at least $365 million and no fewer than 1,300 people over two countries is expected, and you can tell which local variations reflect genuine judgement and which have simply never been challenged. Culture reset matters most here, because sustained assurance depends on people raising issues willingly; platform pivot and integration are the other experiences sought. The capability profile puts risk judgement at level 4; setting risk appetite, engaging regulators and testing assurance are each wanted at level 3. Expect to talk about a decision you made reversibly on incomplete evidence and tightened later, and about the successors you developed.

Chairs first, then the business, then the board

Selection begins in week one with the Audit Committee Chair, privately over video. The Board Chair works through a session with you in the third week. Executive leaders from each function sit as an in-person panel in the fifth week; the decision then goes to the full board of directors in week seven. Within two working days of each stage, a response in writing reaches you.