Top 9 Compliance Auditor Skills to be Best on the Job

Top 9 Compliance Auditor Skills to be Best on the Job

If you are a compliance auditor desiring to achieve success in performing your daily tasks, you need to possess the appropriate skills that your job requires.

This post will show you the right skills and qualities to develop to become more effective and best on the job.

But first:

Who is a Compliance Auditor?

A compliance auditor is someone in charge of ensuring that a company is sticking tight to all Federal and State regulations applicable to its business; reviewing and enforcing compliance with standards or regulations imposed by professional organizations or a company’s internal guidelines.

Compliance auditors conduct audits in areas of accounting, finance, information technology and security.

That explained, now here are:

9 Skills and Qualities to be an Effective Compliance Auditor

1. Communication Skills

Compliance auditors need to develop the ability to communicate clearly and tactfully with colleagues and clients to be effective in performing their duties.

Before compliance auditors can prepare audit report that convey factual information correctly and forcefully, precisely, concisely and clearly, they need to convincingly communicate when called upon to present their work.

Not only do these auditors need to possess effective communication skills, they also need to be good listeners, accurate translators of information, convincing presenters, and credible reporters. All these are part of writing and verbal communication ability.

If compliance auditors want to build positive relationships with senior management and business leaders, and also communicate issues accurately and prioritize them, they need strong communication skills to get that done.

2. Critical Thinking

To be a good compliance auditor, you need to be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions to a problem, as well as conclusions and approaches.

And that means you need good critical thinking ability to help you achieve that goal.

This concerns clear thinking about risk analysis, which requires compliance auditors to analyze data and offer more strategic input.

With thoughtful and autonomous thinking abilities, they can understand the logical connection between business policies and compliance regulations.

Compliance auditors play an important role in providing assurance whether the organization has the ability to achieve its objectives or not.

This means that they should understand the company’s business and how to work together with top management to achieve the organization’s strategy in order to help guide it in the right direction.

3. Business Acumen

When the compliance auditor acquires the knowledge on latest business technologies, they will ensure an error-free audit session that will help them grow in their career pursuit.

Business knowledge and understanding will help compliance auditors to have positive effect on business products, services, markets, customers and users, an understanding of the business from the perspective of different stakeholders’ legal status, organization, and governance.

Therefore, a compliance auditor should dig into all aspects of the business, to observe and record, and explain their results in a relevant business context; and also understand industry trends and best practices.

4. Integrity

When a compliance auditor is honest, they will not certify what they do not believe to be true until they are sure that what they accept to certify is true before making headway.

Moreover, being honest helps the auditor to maintain a good moral standard and reputation, especially during interactions with company employees.

This is ascertained by the fact that majority of people will only follow those that they trust.

Building trust and integrity make compliance auditors to be highly respected as they are perceived to be an independent arm that performs monitoring role on behalf of the organization and ensures that staff act with integrity, putting the interests of the institution before their own.

It is only compliance auditors with honest and trustworthy attitude that can build up the needed confidence and resilience when faced with complex problems, and dealing with audit reports.

5. Organizational Skills

You cannot multitask, break down audit into component parts, or delegate tasks within clearly defined timelines without strong organizational skills.

With these skills, you can understand the differences in the types of enterprises such as limited liability companies, public vs. private companies, multijurisdictional, foreign, and parent vs. subsidiary, as well as other forms such as partnerships, proprietorships, joint ventures and nonprofits – how they are created, what legal authority they are given, and their reporting and filing obligations.

Compliance auditors need to be clear about what needs to be done and how and when they are going to do it.

They need to develop clear goals before the usual compliance process and accomplish the goals within fixed dedicated schedule.

6. Innovation

Compliance auditors should display their innovation in any organization they work for, and combine the quality with current business processes to yield exciting results.

Before auditors can solve business problems within the organization where they work, they need to use audit software and data analysis experience with cutting edge audit techniques.

Furthermore, in order to build a good, unique, and prosperous compliance auditing career, there is need to mingle IT and business audit skills.

7. Leadership

Another quality you need to be best on your job as a compliance auditor is leadership, to enable you to effectively lead the audit team.

You also need to develop the willingness to lead, take charge, control, motivate, inspire, challenge, and offer opinions and directions to your team members.

Great leadership traits will make you to have the desire to help others succeed by acting as a mentor, adviser, and coach.

When you have leadership qualities, you can easily find solutions to complex problems, and develop the ability and skill to assist in getting solutions implemented.

You will also empower clients and co-workers to achieve high performance.

Also, with strong leadership qualities, you can create new leaders for the organization who can drive its future.

8. Teamwork

Think about teamwork skills as what will help you to work well with others. This is because the nature of compliance auditing job requires collaboration with one another as each individual has different strength and skill sets.

When leaders and team members work with collaborated minds and efforts, they can support each other and move the team ahead.

Supporting the audit committee will help you to accomplish the goal of serving the Board of Directors for the organization; empathize, lead, and influence those around.

9. Decision-Making

You should be able to determine what is relevant and what is not once the audit evidence is accumulated, rather than the first resort.

At times, making a decision may not be easy as there is so much accumulated information and tying it all together can be a big challenge.

The need for more information could make you to delay the most appropriate time for decision-making, only to again later conclude that you need even additional information.

This might cause the audit to drag on and on and can finally make you to feel pushed to the wall as you now must make a decision because the client needs their financial statements immediately.

People generally would prefer to transact a business with an auditor that has effective decision making capability; therefore, delaying making a decision for too long can cause your clients to lose confidence in you.

Compliance Auditor Skills for Resume

If you are making a resume for a compliance auditor job, you can quickly highlight the skills and qualities you are bringing to the job by applying the ones presented above if you have them.

Conclusion

If you are a compliance auditor or hope to get into the career, applying the skills and qualities given in this post will help you produce best performance and succeed on the job.