Abstract:

In recent years, expectations from internal audit have changed with globalization, diversification of risks, technological innovations and developments, international standards and legal regulations. Within the framework of both legal regulations and international internal audit standards, it has emerged that internal audit activities should integrate a risk-based perspective into internal audit processes rather than the traditional perspective. While this situation affects all internal audit units operating in different sectors, it has affected the internal audit units of banks, which are mandatory units for banks in Turkey, relatively more. The first stage of the risk-based perspective in internal audit is the planning of the areas to be audited through the risk assessments carried out objectively by the internal audit units. However, there are some difficulties as there is no method for objective risk assessment in practice. For this purpose, in this study, an application has been proposed on how a bank's internal audit unit can objectively prioritize the branches that should be audited, based on an imaginary example. In the proposed application, criteria for the branches to be prioritized in the annual internal audit plan were defined and scored, their weights were calculated with the standard deviation method, and the prioritization rankings for the branches were carried out using the ARAS method.

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