GOVERNANCE AND RISK MANAGEMENT AUDIT EXERCISE
Introduction and assessment task
In this assessment, you are asked to conduct a governance and risk management audit of an organisation with which you have had some association. It could be a large company, a family business, a school, a hospital, a not-for-profit organisation. It could be any organisation that provides a service or conducts any form of social activity
What you are asked to do is a ‘mini-audit’ in which you select an organisation and:
1. Give an overview of the organisation – what it does and how it promotes itself to its shareholder (where relevant) and stakeholders, through official documents, policies, procedures, and advertising. Provide evidence in the form of attachments, but only important documents, or selections that make your point.
2. Clearly state the ‘advertised’ values of the organisation – what it says it stands for. Where these are unclear, try to tease them out.
3. Describe the processes the organisation has in place that promote, monitor, review, action its value commitments. Again, you can’t do everything, so be selective. In your general overview of the organisation’s value commitments, you can state that the organisation is committed to x, y and z, but focus only on z.
4. Review the history of the organisation over the recent past, say, 5 years. You don’t have to be rigid about this. If 10 years is a more appropriate frame of reference, then that’s fine. What you are looking for here is the extent to which the company has been true to its commitments.
5. Draw some conclusions about the company’s integrity. Discuss what you have found. No need to be definite or definitive, since this is only a mini-audit
6. You need to be specific about the things you find that indicate organisational integrity, and those that indicate organisational hypocrisy. Once you have identified key issues, discuss them in light of the key issues covered in the unit.
Important
• The purpose of the audit is to provide an analysis of the values commitment of the organisation. You can focus on key issues, or a business unit, or, if the business is small, the whole organisation.
• Remember to provide relevant contextual overview of the organisation/business unit/issue and information on key personnel/groups/stakeholders.
• Where the organisation has a specific governance or CSR statement, this must be included in your documentation.
• In effect, you are being asked to provide a gap analysis, i.e. the gap between commitments and action. Therefore, you must provide an account of what the commitments are, and what the organisation has done (or not done) to keep those commitments.
• You also need to analyse why you think there is a gap, or no gap between commitments and performance. This is where you can use the theory presented in the unit along with case study examples.
• Indicative length: 3000 words, not including attachments, references or endnotes. However, brevity will be rewarded over bloat, therefore try to be succinct and to the point. Use appendices for the detail and present in a format appropriate to your organisation’s context and practices.
• Use the Harvard referencing style when citing sources. You will lose marks if you fail to do this.
• You may add links to YouTube clips or other multimedia if appropriate as evidence.