Assurance plans
Pivoting our Internal Audit planning approach for agility and capacity
Fire and Emergency New Zealand pivoted towards a new audit planning approach to ensure that the assurance reviews conducted were relevant to the landscape that the organisation operated in.
This diagram outlines our planning approach, this ensures that both an internal and external lens is brought to the audit planning process as well as a risk focus to ensure alignment of what’s important to the organisation. The process employs three techniques to gain a wider assurance lens.
Internal Audits – are retrospective in nature looking at the organisational approach to controls over core processes. The output is a full internal audit report.
Hot reviews – are reviews that are conducted on an ongoing programme of work or control failure. The output is a shorter form audit report which provides a ‘snap-shot’ view of the control environment.
Watching briefs – are conducted across programmes of work or significant risk areas (primarily linked to the organisational strategic risk register) where Assurance closely monitor the design of controls and provide commentary to the Audit and Risk Committee (ARC) on any risk or control areas of concern. The areas of interest may be early in the planning phases or areas for which established.
Assurance reviews planned for the next Quarter
|
Audit Area of Focus |
Indicative High-Level Scope |
| Business Casing |
A review of the ‘front end’ business casing processes including the involvement that differing levels of governance across the organisation have in the process. |
| Hiwa-i-te-rangi |
A review of the project and relative alignment of completed activity and outcomes achieved. |
| Local Planning |
A review of the design of controls in place to meet our legislative requirements. |
Financial Year 2023/24 annual assurance plan
|
Audit Area of Focus |
Indicative High-Level Scope |
| Sensitive Expenditure – data analytics |
A review of sensitive expenditure in alignment with central governments expectations around good practice. This review will use data analytics to provide an in-depth analysis of sensitive expenditure across the organisation. |
| Environmental Sustainability |
To ensure that the Environmental strategy and policy that is communicated to staff is aligned with central government expectations. This includes a gap assessment against expectations of central government with the planned work programme. |
| Travel Office |
A review of the travel management office to assess if the centralisation of services has achieved desired outcomes planned 2.5 years ago. |
| Staff onboarding/offboarding processes |
A review of the organisational processes and controls around staff onboarding and offboarding, including the application of appropriate delegated authorities. |
| Information security & Privacy |
A review of the organisational policies and processes around information sharing, and approach taken to sensitive information and privacy. |
| Organisational Policy monitoring |
A review of the organisational processes in place to ensure that appropriate policies are in place, kept current through appropriate review and ownership exists |
The following six-month plan will be agreed during the September 2023 ARC meeting.
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