Internal Audit and Corporate Governance Effectiveness in Universities in Rivers State (Published)
The increasing demand for internal auditing and the expanded scope of work of the internal audit function places a lot of responsibilities on the internal auditor. The main objective of this study was to establish the nature of the relationship between internal audit and corporate governance in universities in Rivers State. The survey research design was adopted for this study. The population of the study was made up of all the five universities in Rivers State. Convenience sampling technique was adopted in selecting the respondents that constituted the sample of this study. Data collection was done primarily using structured questionnaire to enable the gathering of sufficient evidence about internal audit and corporate governance practices in the universities surveyed. The reliability index of the data collection instrument was 0.885, obtained using the Cronbach Alpha technique. Data analysis was carried out using descriptive statistics while linear regression and correlation analysis were used in testing the hypotheses. The investigation revealed that a positive linear relationship exists between internal audit and corporate governance in universities in Rivers State and that all the measures of internal audit have significant influence on governing council and audit committee effectiveness but do not have significant influence on external audit effectiveness in universities in Rivers State. The study concluded that the internal unit of the universities surveyed, on the average, perform financial, operational and compliance audits. One of the recommendations made was that management and those charged with governance of universities in Rivers State should make effort to inject more qualified, competent and experienced personnel into the internal audit unit; this can be done through the engagement of professional accountants (or auditors) or career internal auditors and by training and retraining their internal auditors to bring them up-to-speed with recent developments in internal auditing and corporate governance.
Keywords: Compliance audit, Corporate Governance, Financial Audit, Internal Audit, Operational Audit.