Leverage Pre-Audit Questionnaires to Improve Efficiency and Reduce Risk of Non-Compliance

The introduction of RegEd’s Pre-audit questionnaire (PAQ) functionality for Audit Management has enabled compliance and audit professionals to ensure that all pertinent data collected via questionnaires is automatically populated, reducing the need for manual transfer and significantly improving audit cycle time, while reducing the risk of input error.

With PAQ’s, auditors and audit schedulers can complete their audit cycle workflows from within a unified tool – schedule audits, designate auditees, assign pre-audit questionnaires, or make changes to distribution recipients from within the solution, for example.

With pre-audit questionnaires, compliance programs are able to benefit from:

  • Reduced travel requirements, amount of time required onsite
  • Increased reach (program-wide and per audit)
  • Improved advisor/rep satisfaction (reduced disruption, time required outside of core activities, etc.)
  • Reduced risk of erroneous or untimely data
  • Increased time spend on core functions outside of audits

Three examples of how clients are using PAQ functionality to enhance their audit processes:

  1. Firm uses PAQ’s to deliver iterative sections of an audit module to intended recipients ahead of an audit. The firm is able to save time by allowing auditors to capture data without the need to schedule meeting time with those representatives that respond prior to the day of the audit. Additionally, any representatives that have scheduled unavailability (out of office, travel plans, etc.) or are otherwise remote have an extended window of time to provide the responses necessary to complete the audit.
  2. Firm utilizes PAQ’s to conduct their branch inspections. By using PAQ’s in combination with the Audit Management solution, the firm is able to collect, analyze and report on all of the necessary elements of the branch inspection module. This significantly reduces the amount of time required on-site per branch inspection, while allowing branch examiners the flexibility to prioritize onsite visits based on the results of the pre-audit questionnaire(s), associated risk of exposure, and potentially resultant heightened supervision status.
  3. Enterprise clients benefit from delivering a pre-defined number of pre-audit questionnaires to multiple audit modules ahead of the onsite audit to capture information that is not considered time sensitive. This provides firms with the capability of collecting vital information ahead of the audit cycle while assuring unannounced audits can be performed as often as required to maintain compliance with evolving regulations.

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