Top Audit, Risk, and Compliance Trends in 2023

The Workiva Amplify conference doubles down on incredible content and actionable insights for the risk management and compliance industry, going all in on the bold future of transparency. Attendees join us in-person or virtually for more than 70+ high-octane, informative sessions across three tracks, including audit, risk, and compliance. 

We took all of these incredible sessions and boiled down internal audit and compliance trends, highlights and predictions for what you can expect in the world of GRC in '23!

Connect your internal audit and SEC reporting teams

Internal auditors and SEC reporting teams are (or should be) meeting with each other and their counterparts in ESG, investor relations, and legal to establish processes for collecting ESG data, embedding internal controls, setting auditing standards, and getting assurance on that data.

How to keep your employees happy

Internal audit representatives from Compass Minerals International Inc, Cornerstone Building Brands, Flowserve Corporation, and Workiva gathered to share talent and acquisition tips from happy, high-performing audit and compliance teams, including:

• If being in the office is required, rotate remote work to give your audit and compliance teams flexibility and a change of scenery
• It’s no secret that the world is in a slightly volatile state. Auditing Interns help relieve pressure—retain them as contractors if your organization is under a hiring freeze
• Trust and transparency matter—employees need to know you support them as they move through their careers as audit professionals, so give them room to grow and a clear pathway to promotions

Don't get lost in audit space

If you’re getting buried tracking audits and trying to untangle versions, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. You just need the right audit reporting tool for the job. For example, the Workiva platform enables real-time collaboration while providing an automatic audit trail of revisions, providing compliance management for audit teams in one easy-to-use platform. This means Internal auditors, SEC reporting, and investor relation teams  can work in a document at the same time, and permissioning levels allow you to control who has access.

Flexibility—it’s not just good for yoga

The environments we operate our businesses in are continually evolving. Staying up-to-date on auditing standards and trends in risk audits, you have to stay flexible in how you view and manage risk in order to help your business flourish amid change.

Jeremy Ford, Director of Commerical Risk at KBR, shared how the transformation of their business required them to take a fresh approach to risk management and how the Workiva platform made simplified risk assessments possible.

The focus on understanding risk was a key element in KBR’s transformation from a large industrial engineering and heavy construction leader into a global knowledge, technology, and services leader serving multiple industries. New types of risk had to be managed with the diversification of the business—some of them very different from the traditional risk profile of the organization and requiring very different metrics and risk mitigation approaches. 

The company transformed from a paper-based system to using Workiva’s cloud solution, scaling hundreds of risk owners. At the same time, they embraced an enterprise risk approach involving regular discussions with business leaders to understand the risks facing their business by using risk assessment frameworks provided by Workiva’s enterprise risk management platform.

KBR’s advice to building a solid ERM:  

• Rather than build an ERM program in Excel spreadsheets, begin with Workiva’s ERM solution to enable collection, analysis, and risk management across the organization 
• Building a process in spreadsheets doesn’t lend itself to hundreds of controls and risk owners, but a cloud platform empowers an organization to manage the whole risk assessment process from a single place—saving time on gathering and synthesizing data and reporting results
• Embrace dashboards to help risk owners through the executive team to get real-time visibility on the status of risks and action plans
• Create a consistent risk assessment framework that allows information to flow up, down, and across the organization