LAHORE
Pakistan Internal Audit Summit 2017 took place at a local hotel here, on Wednesday. The event featured presentations and panel discussions by industry experts, industry leaders, and Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) officials.
Eithad Airways (UAE) Head of Business Transformation M. Ali Dada, in his presentation, insisted that auditors are not only supposed to diagnose the problems in a company’s operations but also to suggest practical and tangible remedies to those problems. Gulf Drilling International (Qatar) Chief Internal Auditor Syed Imran Zia made ‘relationship between the auditors and the companies’ the premise for his presentation. He said that in a jungle it doesn’t matter if you are a gazelle or a lion because when you wake up you have to run faster than the other to survive. “It’s the same in the world of auditing. By 2020, 94pc of auditors’ work will be doable by robots. So auditors need to improve their nature of work if they want to survive. The industry in Pakistan itself has to innovate and adapt if we don’t want to be left far behind rest of the world.”
AF Ferguson & Co Pakistan Partner Tahir Sharif, Ittehad Chemicals Group Director Operations Abdul Hai Khatri, and Shakarganj Limited CEO Ali Altaf Saleem shared their experiences with internal auditing in a panel discussion. Khatri accentuated the value of communication between the auditors and the management and said that internal auditors prepare lengthy reports to show they have worked hard but in reality, their effectiveness can fall behind if they only mention problems. Ali noted that auditors are sometimes considered as outsiders by the other employees of the company, therefore it is imperative that a mechanism is put in place for smooth flow of information from management to auditors if a company is to be truly evaluated.
Tahir added that his company practices two-fold assurance of auditors’ work. “There is a board and audit committee to ensure that the audit has been thorough and then there is a second quality assurance review of the whole company which also includes internal auditors’ performance.”
The event included elaborate discussions on forensic auditing and its challenges, cybersecurity issues, and data analytics and robotics press automation. Shields were also distributed among speakers and panel members. Training Resource and Conference Producer Company, TerraBiz organised the conference which will be followed by two master classes on Thursday, by KPMG Taseer Hadi & Co. Partner and Head of Forensics Muhammad Talha, and BDO Lahore Partner Muhammad Imran and BDO Ebrahim & Co. Partner Zulfiqar Kauser.
