Career Path Of A Senior Internal Auditor At Compass Diversified
Suzanne, a Senior Internal Auditor at Compass Diversified, focuses on "four or five" subsidiaries, often geographically dispersed, working on specific processes like "financial close" or "order to cash." Each year involves process walkthroughs, risk identification, control testing, and ultimately, helping subsidiaries maintain "clean and by the books" financials before external audits.
Internal Auditing, Risk Management, Financial Reporting, Process Documentation, Teamwork
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Suzanne Couch
Sr Internal Auditor
Compass Diversified
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina Master of Accounting
Biology & Related Sciences
Finance (Banking, Fintech, Investing)
Finance
None Applicable
Video Highlights
1. Suzanne's role involves working with multiple subsidiaries, focusing on specific processes like financial close or order-to-cash. This highlights the varied responsibilities and potential for specialization within internal audit.
2. The process includes documenting narratives, identifying risks, evaluating controls, and testing their effectiveness. This shows the investigative and analytical skills needed in internal audit, along with collaboration with management.
3. The goal is to proactively identify problems before external auditors, emphasizing a preventative and collaborative approach to maintaining financial integrity. This underscores the importance of internal audit in protecting a company's financial health and reputation.
Transcript
What are your main responsibilities within your current role?
As a senior internal auditor, I'm typically assigned to about four or five subsidiaries within Compass's portfolio, which means four or five different companies. I live in northern Kentucky, outside of Cincinnati. However, the companies I'm usually assigned to are on the West coast.
This includes places west of me like Los Angeles, Utah, and Colorado. For each subsidiary, we start the year by doing a walkthrough. I'm assigned specific processes within each subsidiary, as I'm part of a team and don't handle everything myself.
For example, I might be assigned the financial close process, the income tax process, or the order to cash process. We begin the year with walkthroughs where we use documented narratives. These narratives detail everything from the start to the end of a process, including key players and controls.
We review these narratives to see if there have been any updates from previous years. If it's a new subsidiary, we have to start from scratch. We talk to each process owner to find out exactly what they do and document it. We typically do this in the spring.
Once the processes are documented, we look for potential risks. This is definitely easier if we've worked with the company for a second, third, or fourth year. The first year is more work because there's nothing to build upon from previous years.
After identifying the risks, we examine the controls in place that mitigate those risks and how they are performed. We also need to understand the frequency of these controls. We work with management to get them to commit to these processes.
It's not enough to simply say a report is reviewed; we need to know if it's done quarterly or monthly. The next step is to test these identified controls. We usually have two or three different test phases throughout the year to verify that the companies are performing what they say they are.
Our ultimate job is to find problems before external auditors do. We are there to help fix issues before the companies get into trouble. Ideally, we present ourselves as helpful, even though people might not typically think of auditors that way. We are all working as a team to ensure the financials are as clean and by the books as possible.
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