An auditor finds that a plant manager approved $240,000 of unsupported vendor payments. The manager offers to "correct it quietly" before the report goes out. Nothing in the Standards tells you what to say next. Integrity does.
Integrity is the ethics principle that makes every other principle usable. Objectivity, competency, due professional care, and confidentiality all assume the auditor reports what the evidence shows. If the auditor softens a finding under pressure, none of the other principles survive.
Integrity in the Global Internal Audit Standards has three working parts:
- Honesty: Report what the evidence supports, in full, without omission or shading of tone.
- Professional courage: Say the uncomfortable thing to the person who does not want to hear it, and escalate when the answer is unsatisfactory.
- Lawful and professional conduct: Obey the law, the profession's ethical requirements, and the organization's legitimate policies, in your work and in your personal conduct where it reflects on the profession.
KEY: Honesty is what you report. Courage is whether you report it when it costs you. The exam separates these: a stem where the auditor writes an accurate finding but...
Common mistakes
- Treating remediation as erasure. A condition that existed during the period is reported even if management fixed it last week. Remediation moves to the action-plan section.
- Merging integrity with objectivity. Deleting an exception is integrity. Auditing the process you designed is objectivity. Both can appear in one stem.
- Confronting the suspect. On discovered fraud, the auditor preserves evidence and escalates. Interviewing the suspect or announcing the discovery destroys the investigation.
Bottom line
- Integrity has three parts: honesty in what you report, professional courage in reporting it under pressure, and lawful and professional conduct in all situations.
- Honesty covers evidence handling, scope representation, attribution, time and expense reporting, and the rating you assign.
- Report the sample as tested (4 of 25 items, a 16% rate); any population projection is labeled an estimate.
- Remediation before issuance changes the action plan, not whether the condition is reported.
Exam shortcut
Read the stem for the verb applied to the finding. If someone deletes, softens, relabels, or omits, the principle at issue is integrity. If someone is biased, related, or auditing prior work, the principle is objectivity. Both may sit in the same vignette; answer the one the question names.
The full lesson (about 2,222 words, 15 min read) adds 2 worked examples, all 6 common mistakes, a self-check, free in the app.
Learning objectives
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