Treading delicately

1. Treading delicately Evaluative aspects of audit reports written in a multinational corporate context Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

2. Context of the research • English courses held within a Master’s Course in Governance, Control and Auditing at the Catholic University in Milan in collaboration with an Italian multinational • No appropriate course books were available • The course was built around authentic materials that were provided by the company and culminated in English for Internal Auditors (Murphy, ISU, Milan, 2006) Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

3. What do auditors actually do? • They check the efficiency of all processes and procedures in all departments of a company, from ordering stationery, to company payrolls, to keeping archives up to date… • A tricky task: nobody really likes auditors… seen as inspectors Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

4. Definition by the Institute of Internal Auditors Internal Auditing is an independent, objective assurance and consulting activity designed to add value and improve an organization's operations. It helps an organization accomplish its objectives by bringing a systematic, disciplined approach to evaluating and improving the effectiveness of risk management, control, and governance processes. Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

5. Main goal of internal audits To examine and evaluate the adequacy and effectiveness of the organisation's system of internal control whose primary objective is to ensure: • Reliability and integrity of information • Compliance with policies, plans, procedures • Safeguarding of assets • Economical and efficient use of resources • Accomplishment of established objectives and goals for operations or programs Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

6. Steps in the audit process Preliminary Survey Kick Off Meeting Meeting with Top Management Issue of Audit Report Field Work Notification Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

7. Collecting background information and defining operating program. Steps Preliminary Survey Kick Off Meeting Meeting with Top Management Issue of Audit Report Field Work Notification Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

8. Presentation of scope of work and audit program, with description of the main areas, processes and systems to be audited. Steps Preliminary Survey Kick Off Meeting Meeting with Top Management Issue of Audit Report Field Work Notification Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

9. Collecting, analysing, interpreting and documenting information to support audit results. • Discussion with operational Managers about audit results in order to share findings and recommendations. Steps Preliminary Survey Kick Off Meeting Meeting with Top Management Issue of Audit Report Field Work Notification Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

10. Presentation of final evaluation about internal control system and definition of corrective actions to remove main audit findings. Steps Preliminary Survey Kick Off Meeting Meeting with Top Management Issue of Audit Report Field Work Notification Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

11. Steps Preliminary Survey Kick Off Meeting Meeting with Top Management Issue of Audit Report Field Work Notification Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

12. The key activities of an auditor • fieldwork (collecting data, reading documents, interviewing staff or filling out questionnaires), • writing the report of findings (of varying significance) • negotiating with management about the findings. Key interpersonal skills: • (oral skills) finding out information in preliminary meetings, interviewing members of staff, etc. • (written) presenting information in an objective fashion Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

13. The need for politeness and objectivity • Auditing: delicate, complex, intercultural communicative event • Auditors sent from Italy anywhere in the world • English not necessarily native tongue for anyone involved • Maximum cooperation needed for the job to be done Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

14. My problems in approaching these texts • Knowledge of the processes of any kind of department in a multinational: human resources, finance, procurement, payroll, purchase • understanding what the findings are, because the auditing process is complicated; Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

15. Problems for the NN writer of the reports • Building on past experience of NN speaker auditors • Not having a wide inventory of delicate evaluative strategies (cutting and pasting) Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

16. The tone of the texts according to the Head Auditor • When writing a report, the most important thing is to adopt an appropriate tone. The addressees of an audit are managers, directors, or executives who have little time, so audit texts have to be clear and concise. • The tone needs to be objectivein describing any anomalies that the audit has revealed, and clear in advising on how to rectify the situation. At the same time, the tone needs to be respectful of the addressee. Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

17. Gauging the right tone • The facts must be laid out appropriately. It is important that the auditors performing the audit do not give the impression of being in any way “superior” to the department being audited. The auditors are both consultants of the company, and evaluators of the adequacy of the control systems, and the observations made by the auditors should appear as advice. • If an audit has brought problems of a serious nature to light, then the tone of the report will be more authoritative and authoritarian. This is made clear from the beginning of the report, however. In any case, a report is never conceived of as an attack on a department, but as an objective evaluation which foresees an action plan and a target date by which the action should be implemented. If the attitude the auditors assume is the right one, then the audited department will accept the advice given in the report, rather than feel under attack. Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

18. The data • The multinational supplied a number of authentic documents of varying text types, written by Italian auditors in English in 2000; • Text types: memos, emails, questionnaires, and audit reports; • Genre (culturally determined communicative event, Gillaerts/Gotti 2006)? • The reports mentioned here amount to 200,000 tokens; • Limitation: many audit reports were actually doubles. Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

19. Stages of an audit report • Executive summary • Introduction: type of audit, area of company, period • Objectives and scope • Background of company/department • Conclusions (summary of findings) • Findings and recommendations in detail Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

20. The function of these texts • Basically evaluative • They give a judgement on whether a process is efficient or not (whether it works, basically whether it is good or bad) • Something is always not satisfactory in the system (the evaluation is more bad than good) Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

21. What kind of evaluation is at stake? • Evaluation: expression of the speaker/writer’s stance, viewpoint or feelings about entities and propositions (Hunston and Thompson 2000: 5) • Here: no individual, personal opinion • Evaluation scale: good/bad; desirability Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

22. Findings of significance Findings are divided into the following categories: • Facts (the way things stand) • Criteria (what should be and isn’t) • Cause (the perceived reason behind the finding) • Effect/Risk/Result • Recommendations • Management Comments Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

23. The cline of evaluation • From Facts (objective) onwards, an increase in the subjective involvement in the description of the findings, perceived through the lexico-grammar • Culminating in the Recommendations section, characterised by intensified language Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

24. Averral - attribution • Only averral Verbs of reporting: State (124) • The Auditor states that • Senior Management has stated that • Clause 23.2 of the Agreement states that… Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

25. Relatively rare first person plural • During our (detailed, in-depth/independent) review, we found that… • We noted • Use of the pattern It is + evaluative adj + that • apparent, important, likely, possible, true, unlikely, vital Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

26. Auditors own actions evaluated positively (through adj.) • During our • detailed • in-depth • independent review • Recommendations to others: • A thorough review should be performed Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

27. Findings: Facts Our general review of the current Master Vendors’ list showed that it was last updated on 1st Sept. 1998. A) noun form of verb review; reified process Review is a neutral verb, no opinion appears to be involved • The verb: A review of XYX showed that Occasionally: highlighted/identified/indicated that – objective evidence; Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

28. Criteria: why the fact discovered constitutes a problem that needs solving. • It reports the guidelines which the company or department should be following and obviously isn’t. • The most frequent modal auxiliary used here is should, which is often followed by the verb BE + an adjective + noun, or by a passive form of the verb. • Examples: - All invoices should be paid by the due date and stamped as paid. - There should be adequate segregation of duties in the procurement system. Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

29. Modals • Should 1,742 0.84 % • Will 462 0.22 % • Might 278 0.13 % • May 262 0.13 % • Could 135 0.07 % • Would 137 0.07 % • Can 107 0.05 % • Shall 84 0.04 % • Must 27 Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

30. Cause: attempts to explain why the situation is problematic • Key features: the prepositional phrase due to, meaning because of or owing to, and the adverb primarily. • Passives • Here the personal element emerges through adverbs of degree qualifying due to, including entirely, largely and partly. • Criteria All Work Orders should be duly signed off in accordance with the Logistics Support Procedure and the Authorisation Matrix. CauseThis was entirelydue to a breach of Company procedure. • Criteria Materials for salvage should be located in a dedicated area. CauseThis is primarily due to acutback of Stores’ Staff and thus available resources dedicating their time to other work priorities. Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

31. Effect/Risk/Result • The effects/risk section points out where the real or potential dangers lie of leaving the finding as it is. It should convince the readers of the report that the finding has to be rectified, but can only suggest. • Modals of possibility: might/could • As a result, items of the Warehouse, which have been recently ordered might be omitted form the Inventory Listing and thus, low quantities of Materials/Consumables might be reordered. • Use of the pattern it is + evaluative adj + that (particularly with possible) Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

32. Suggesting the risks/effects • Effect/Risk As a result the Company was exposed to risk in the following areas:- * Without an Audit Clause the Company might be denied access to conduct audits of Contractors’ books. Such an omission might also relieve the Contractor of maintaining adequate accounting and contractual books and records * Vessel substitutions might not be suitable and incur possible delays or increased costs due to limitations of the vessels, especially in the case of pollution of the environment Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

33. Recommendations • ubiquitous deontic should, the strongest modal used in the corpus • examples of intensified language (Iedema, Feez, White 1997) – time expressions as soon as possible, • the determiner all • Adverbs such as properly • Recommendations * A full physical inventory count of all the contents of the main safe should be conducted as soon as possible, using the limited physical count by the auditors as the starting point. * All tapes and licensed software should be properly identified and stored for ease of future physical counts. Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan

34. Conclusions • Evaluations are standardized in these texts • The NN speaker authors of these texts could tread more delicately • Their inventory of evaluative language could be extended Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica, Milan