Internal Auditor

Job description

Job Description:

As M&S journeys through an exciting business transformation, the Internal Audit & Risk (IA&R) function plays a key role in supporting this by providing independent and objective feedback to the Audit Committee and Business Leadership on key risks to the business and the effectiveness of mitigating controls. The functional remit is extensive and covers all commercial and functional activities and provides access to all levels of management. The team also provides consulting support to project teams on the design and implementation of business process controls and conducts investigations in the event of a significant control failure.

Joining the Internal Audit & Risk team at this time provides an unrivalled opportunity to gain exposure to a major business transformation at a truly iconic institute. This is a great opportunity to work in a team that has a genuinely wide-ranging role with unique exposure to all areas of the business and management.

The team is focussed on building trusted stakeholder relationships across all levels of the organisation and continuously seeks to enhance its activities and output. This is a great opportunity to work with different teams across M&S, reviewing the effectiveness of business processes, challenging and supporting improvements to the control environment and adding value to the business during the ongoing transformational change.

Key stakeholders for IA&R are the Audit Committee, Executive Directors, Business Unit Directors and Functional Heads.

What is the role?

• The role reports into the Internal Audit Manager team. There are no direct reports.

• The role is wide ranging, covering all business areas in the UK and internationally and involves interaction and engagement across all levels of the organisation.

• The successful candidate will learn how different activities across M&S work, assessing how control activities are designed and whether they operate effectively. The candidate will work with business stakeholders to improve and strengthen the business by identifying corrective actions that are effective, commercial and pragmatic.

• Participation in audit scoping, leading audit fieldwork and working with team members.

• Other elements of the role include support of the continuous improvement objectives of the function, building effective relationships with stakeholders and supporting ad hoc projects as needed, such as those linked to investigations or risk management.

• There will be limited UK and International travel (approximately 5-10%).

What are you accountable for achieving?

Audit Delivery

• Participation and leading audit activities, ensuring that business relevance and commercial focus is maintained. This will include delivery of a clear risk assessment, test programme and audit report, addressing key risks and audit objectives in line with the Internal Audit methodology.

• Flexing the audit scope in light of emerging challenges or issues.

• Presenting results clearly, concisely and objectively and working with the rest of the team, including an Internal Audit Manager, to report appropriately and recommend future actions.

• Ensuring that key business stakeholders are involved throughout the audit, with regular progress updates provided in order to avoid unexpected results.

• Maintain quality and integrity standards.

• Delivering against functional KPI targets

Action follow up

• Maintaining regular contact with action owners to obtain progress updates and drive timely completion of audit actions.

• Supporting compilation of the audit action status reports for the Operating and Audit Committees.

Development of Internal Audit Plan

• Assisting the management team to develop the annual audit plan by proposing relevant audits for inclusion, as identified through business knowledge and discussion with key stakeholders. Supporting potential revision of the plan during the year.

Stakeholder and Relationship Management

• Actively developing strong relationships with a wide range of business contacts to gain knowledge and insight into the issues affecting the business and maintaining effective partnerships with business management teams.

• Using relevant audit knowledge and experience as well as adopting the M&S behaviours during interactions with the business to give credibility to the audit work undertaken.

Continuous Improvement

• Compliance with professional CPE requirements.

• A desire to update and expand knowledge of good practices, professional developments, industry changes and sharing these across the team. This includes an increasing adoption of data analytics-based testing.

• Providing ideas and challenge to improve our audit methodology, the control environment and the effectiveness of business processes.

What skills do you need?

• Excellent communication, both written and verbal.

• Ability to develop audit programmes from first principles where no prior audit files exist.

• Requirement to produce high quality audit files to support the work completed, and conclusions reached.

• A strong team player, capable of building and maintaining effective relationships.

• Customer focused, with the confidence to deal with and influence at all levels.

• Integrity and objectively.

• Commercial acumen with the ability to make practical recommendations that will add value to the business.

• Excellent analysis and problem-solving skills, with the ability to challenge where necessary.

• A curious and sceptical mindset.

• A willingness to adopt new ways of working.

What technical knowledge do you need?

• Accounting or Audit qualification (ACA/ACCA or IIA is preferred).

• Demonstrable knowledge of risk and control audit methodologies and practical experience of auditing techniques, including risk assessment, controls evaluation, different testing methodologies (substantive and non-substantive) and audit report writing.

• Internal Audit experience strongly preferred

• Practical knowledge of application of data analytics techniques is not essential but would be a key differentiator.

• Retail experience would be also be an advantage.