Internal Audit

BarkerGilmore, a Chief Compliance Officer executive search firm specializing in compliance leadership, has released its 2026 Chief Compliance Officer Compensation Report, providing an in-depth analysis of Chief Compliance Officer compensation, executive mobility, and leadership trends across today’s compliance market.

Shadow IT has challenged internal auditors for more than a decade. Shadow AI is the same phenomenon, but accelerated, more opaque, and materially riskier. It refers to employees using generative and agentic AI tools without the knowledge or approval of IT, compliance, or risk management. Attorneys pasting contracts into public chatbots, clinicians uploading patient notes for transcription, and developers debugging proprietary code in consumer models illustrate the pattern.

The Institute of Internal Auditors has named Stacey Schabel, CIA, CPA, as Chair of the Global Board for the 2026-2027 term. The announcement was made during The IIA’s 2026 International Conference in Singapore. Schabel joins the ranks of volunteer leaders who have helped shape the profession and guide the IIA’s mission through the years as Global Board Chair.

Summer is just about in full swing and at many internal audit offices across the nation the summer internship program is getting underway. Fresh-faced young adults are learning the basics of internal audit and kicking off what, for some, will be an exciting career in the profession. It was 2015 when I started my first internship in internal audit.

From the moment a customer places an order to the point cash is collected and revenue is recognized, the order-to-cash (O2C) cycle is one of the most complex and consequential processes in any organization. Despite being well understood in theory, it consistently produces significant control failures in practice.

Many multinational organizations believe their compliance programs are standardized across regions. Yet internal audit teams are increasingly discovering the opposite. Internal audit executives are increasingly operating in a landscape where regions no longer have a single compliance structure.

GUEST BLOG POST Let me start with a real-life story. When I worked at Solectron, the former CFO, Kiran Patel, held an all-finance meeting in one of our manufacturing plants in Milpitas, California. At the end of the meeting, a lady who had been with the company for many years approached him. She asked whether Kiran found the report she sent him every month useful. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t think of a report he got from her every month. So, he asked her what it was about and where she sent it.

Technology budgets at legal departments are predicted to double in the next two years, according to research and analysis by Gartner Inc. According to the business and technology insights company, specialized legal AI platforms, such as Harvey, Legora, GC AI, and Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, are delivering significant productivity and efficiency gains in important legal workflows, leading companies to significantly increase what they are planning to spend on legal technology in the near future.

The internal audit profession stands at an inflection point. While organizations increasingly operate through data-rich systems, automated workflows, and AI-enabled decision-making, many audit approaches remain grounded in manual sampling and retrospective control testing. The question is no longer whether internal audit should leverage data analytics, but whether it can remain strategically relevant without doing so.

Recurring audit findings are a familiar challenge for most internal audit functions. Year after year, the audit is completed, the report is issued, and management commits to remediation. Yet, when the next audit begins, the same findings reemerge. Different year, same weakness, same conversation. After twenty years in internal audit across private and public sector organizations, I have stopped being surprised by recurring findings.