Factors Influencing the Quality of Internal Audits in SMEs

Title

Factors Influencing the Quality of Internal Audits in SMEs

Creator

Hephzibah, S.; Vincent, Theresa Nithila; Jain, Pooja; Tantia, Veerta

Description

Internal auditors role and their quality output are one of the essential features of an organisation. But a specific internal audit department is one of the easily ignoring cost cutting method for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), due to their limited resources and various challenges. Based on the recent corporate governance stress, most of the listed SMEs are employing internal audit departments, but the autonomy of internal auditors which are questionable generally among all the industries are considered to be very challenging to attain in SMEs. The aim of this study is to examine how effective are the internal auditors role in listed SMEs and what are the key factors that will impact high-quality audits. Audit committee, autonomy of internal auditors and fraud risk assessment are the key factors considered to achieve the objective of study. For the comprehensive analysis of this study 71 listed SMEs are considered and quantitative research methodology is used for the collection of data. The findings shows that these key factors are crucial to improve audit quality of SMEs. The study provides valuable insights and guidance for SMEs to augment their internal control systems and achieve long-term sustainable growth as they prone to witness constant changes in the present business world. The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.

Source

Studies in Systems, Decision and Control;Volume;620;pp.745-758

Date

01-01-2026

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH

Subject

Audit Committee; Audit quality; Autonomy of internal auditors; Fraud risk assessment; Internal audit

Coverage

Hephzibah S., Christ University, Bangalore, India; Vincent T.N., Christ University, Bangalore, India; Jain P., Christ University, Bangalore, India; Tantia V., Christ University, Bangalore, India

Rights

Restricted Access; Hardcopy may be available in the library

Relation

ISSN: 21984182;

Format

online

Language

English

Type

Book chapter

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-02056-7_61

https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105027027272?origin=resultslist