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Mary Brady Greenawalt: Department of Business Administration, The Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina, USA
As a professional, an internal auditor must possess the ability to make well-justified judgements in conducting an audit. Whether it is an operational, financial statement, or compliance audit, the professional judgements must be justifiable and well justified, partly because of some people's inability to assess the validity and reliability of these opinions, despite their need to rely on the results. Exercise of professional judgement calls for utilization of critical thinking skills at the highest level. As Schleifer and Greenawalt phrased it in their earlier examination of the internal auditor and the critical thinking process, "in short, the internal auditor needs to function as the critical thinker par excellence"[1].
In ranking reasoning skills as the No. 1 competence needed by Certified Internal Auditors (CIAs), the respondents to the common body of knowledge (CBOK) study conducted most recently by the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) acknowledged the overriding importance of critical thinking abilities [2]. The need for these "general knowledge" competences surpassed knowledge of any specific subject area in importance. The general knowledge competences for reasoning and problem defining are described as follows. The internal auditor must be able to:
- apply problem-solving skills;
- understand the role of information in problem solving;
- use inductive and deductive reasoning;
- Understanding the decision-making process[2].
While thinking skills topped the list of needed competences, an internal auditor obviously needs to know at least the basics in a wide variety of subject areas and to have a greater degree of proficiency in other areas. According to the CBOK study, ten subject areas in which internal auditors need competence are, in descending order of importance: communications, auditing, ethics, organizations, sociology, fraud, computers, financial accounting, data gathering, and managerial accounting.
From one perspective, however, thinking skills such as reasoning and problem-solving abilities should not be equated with knowledge of particular sets of facts or subject areas, such as the design and findings of the CBOK study imply. Nor should reasoning skills be seen as competing with knowledge of relevant subject areas for emphasis on a professional examination such as that for CIAs. Rather, reasoning skills and knowledge of particular topic areas can be viewed as complementary components needed...