Compliance auditors review a company’s activities to ensure they meet established standards, which can be legal, professional, or internal. They gather information through record reviews, interviews, and observations, and provide suggestions for improvement. They work in various industries and require high ethical standards.
A compliance auditor is a person who reviews a company’s activities to determine whether or not those activities meet established standards. Compliance auditors are usually graduates of accounting, finance or a related field. They may also have specialized training unique to the industry they work in. In the healthcare field, for example, compliance auditors are fully trained in protocols designed to promote patient safety, privacy and health.
The standards used by a compliance auditor to assess a company can come in many forms. For many types of industries, some of the standards are enshrined in law. The compliance auditor must be familiar with relevant areas of the law, including recent amendments, in order to confirm that the company is acting within the law. Other standards may include those established by professional organizations. Standards can also be internal in nature, with companies setting their own standards with the aim of providing high quality products and services.
The compliance auditor reviews company records, interviews employees, inspects employee manuals and handbooks, and visits various areas of the company to observe company procedures and practices. All this information is gathered in a formal report presented to the company. The report indicates areas where the company may be at risk of non-compliance or where it is actively violating standards and provides suggestions for improvement.
Some companies maintain a full-time compliance department that is responsible for regular, ongoing audits. Big companies and companies that deal with sensitive materials are more likely to have these departments. In other cases, an independent compliance auditor is hired to examine a company. Independent auditors may also be engaged by external authorities, such as a bank’s loan partners, with the aim of confirming that a company is meeting the terms of a contract. The content of reports may be kept confidential in the case of internal auditors or published, at least in part, when the audit involves oversight of another organization, such as a government agency.
Some examples of areas in which a compliance auditor might work include: information technology, security, healthcare privacy, banking, occupational health and safety, information security, law enforcement, and quality control. These professionals receive varying rates of compensation depending on the services they provide, training and experience. Because they are responsible for keeping companies in good working order and handling sensitive materials along the way, compliance auditors also need very high ethical standards.
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