INTERNAL AUDIT AS A MEANS OF MANAGEMENT CONTROL IN PUBLIC ENTERPRISES A CASE STUDY OF POWER HOLDING COMPANY OF NIGERIA, SAPELE STATION

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

The word auditing has its origin from the Latin word audit meaning to hear essentially auditing to concern with an examination and inquiring into a statement of accounts. The underlying records, documents, assets and liabilities by an independent person with a view to express an opinion as to compliance and correctness of the financial statement to relevant acts and regulations and communicating the opinion to interested users. It origin has been traced to the early times of ancient Greek, Romans and Egyptians where they would ask group of persons to sit down and hear (or listed explanations from another group of persons concerned with the financial records). In the middle ages, great landowners appoint persons who are called Stewards to manage the land for them. Stewardship as it was called is the name given to the practice by which productive resources are managed by one person or group of persons on behalf of one person or group of persons. The concept of stewardship gave rise to accountability where the servants or works has to render accounts to the master as at when required to do so.

Since the shareholders gave their resources for expansion of the company they are very much interested in the sincerity and truthfulness attached to the director hence, they decided to engaged the services of a professional labeled “Auditor” to ascertain the fruitfulness of the records so maintained and presented. In the early days of auditing, the prime qualification for the position of an auditor for his integrity and independence of mind would be sought for his position, the matter of technical ability being entirely secondary. Consequently upon this, the function of the auditor in those days were confused with that of an accountant. This issues under consideration in this research work involves another special kind of auditors. Many organisations have found a need for internal audit, internal auditors are employees of the organisation and they work exclusively for the organisation. Internal auditing can be therefore defined as an independent appraisal activity with an organisation as a service to management. It is a managerial control which functions by measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of other control. Agbawe (2005) described internal audit as “Audit conducted by an employee of an organisation into any area of its affairs”. This is usually a day-to-day activity involving pre-payment audits, post-payment audits and other audit functions. Internal audit involves the following process.