Tag: quality assurance

Whilst most corporations across the world have had to make drastic changes to their business operations as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many business leaders believe that the disruptions caused by the pandemic have inadvertently introduced more advantages than disadvantages. 

Buzzwords like automation, mechanisation and digitisation can sound like the end of the human workforce and the loss of personalisation, but in fact they offer a bright and efficient future for the assurance industry. The lexicon of technology buzzwords has become, for many sectors, representative of complexity, unwanted change and negativity.

Manufacturers and distributors are operating in intensely pressured times. Stats SA reported that manufacturing output contracted for the ninth consecutive month in February of 2020 with the full extent of the damage caused by COVID-19 and the nationwide lockdown still unknown.

Considering the high profile scandals that have dominated news headlines in the last few years, from VBS Mutual Bank to Eskom, it does not seem unreasonable to say that South Africa may have a corporate fraud problem. What’s more, the accounting irregularities that led to shareholders being defrauded and losing significant shareholder value, may have been entirely preventable if the internal auditors had been more empowered, protected and held to the same level of accountability as external auditors, via appropriate regulation of the internal audit industry.