Internal Auditors Are Your Friends

Dum, Dum, Dum....yup, its that time again bankers. The list has been sent out and your internal auditors are about to dig into a random list of your credits. This is a time when many get very uncomfortable and insecure about their files. So let me blow your mind. Don't even open the e-mail. Yup, I said it. Don't open the e-mail, don't even try to know what they will be reviewing, have confidence in your credit management skills.

After all, the auditors job is to scrub our files and see what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong. This is a tough position to take, after all we would all like to pass these exams with flying colors and show the world how good we are at our file management. But do we really benefit when we are rushing to make sure we're caught up on file memos? Scrubbing financials to make sure we're up to date? I say no. We are not better off. I don't know about you but I don't learn unless I screw something up first.

For example, my audit is over and I did well. The items that were noted were easily remedied and in most cases there were no issues at all. What did I learn? I need to immediately get electronic submissions of financials into our system. Most of what was missing was sitting in my CMA files (Cover My &^%) Side note, set these up in your Outlook per customer and park all your correspondence here, do this for your co-workers and bosses also, it is always nice to be able to track back approvals, or correspondence when the parties involved don't recall what they said, it feels good and keeps everyone on their toes.

My new policy thanks to this audit is to immediately submit financials that are delivered electronically when they come in and before they land in the CMA files. So this was a worthy audit and I benefited from it.

So the next time you get the notice that your internal auditors are coming for a review, don't freak out, in fact don't do anything, let them scrub your files, take their feedback and make improvements where needed going forward. After all, how else can we really improve on what we do if we aren't genuinely tested every once in a while.