Auditoria financeira é assunto da auditoria interna?

Abstract

Internal audit plays an important role for organizations in both the private and public sectors. The evaluation of internal controls is intended to add value and enhance the operations of an entity. In the public sector, governmental audit, divided into two areas (external audit and internal audit), has undergone various changes in recent decades, impacting its mode of operation. The public sector managerial reforms, influenced by ideas stemming from the New Public Management, have also affected governmental audit, expanding the discussion on various topics related to the field, such as performance measurement, audit scope, and approaches. In the Brazilian case, there are still some issues that need to be discussed in the literature, such as the use of financial audit techniques by government internal audit units. From this context, the present article presents a discussion on the use of financial audit by internal audits, through a content analysis that covered 19 scientific articles published in English between 2001 and 2023 (up to July). The analyses indicated that there is evidence in around 20 countries of the technique's use by government internal audit units. It was also observed that the role of internal audit as defined by regulatory bodies was similar to the one proposed by the analyzed literature. The research limitations demonstrate that there is additional evidence of usage in other countries, however not covered in the current paper. Therefore, the research provides a non-exhaustive list of evidence of the use of financial audit techniques by government internal audit units, limited to original researches.