About Internal Audit Guide
Built by practitioners. Free for the profession.
Internal Audit Guide is an independent reference for internal auditors and everyone who works with them — auditees, risk teams, audit committees, and CIA candidates. 300+ in-depth guides, four free in-browser tools, no paywall, no signup, and no vendor behind the curtain.
- Practitioner-written
- Independent — no vendor, no sponsor
- 100% free, nothing gated
- Grounded in IIA, COSO & ISACA guidance
Written by people who do this work for a living — not a content farm.
What you’ll find here
Three things, all free
A library organized like the job, tools that respect your data, and honest career guidance.
300+ guides, A to Z
From “what is internal audit” to auditing interest-rate risk in the banking book — every guide sits in a working taxonomy: foundations, the audit process end to end, a risk library, governance and standards, technology, industries.
Browse the A–Z index → The toolsIA QuickTools
Four in-browser utilities — RCM Workbench, mySampler, myDayLog, and a Self-Assessment Hub — built private by architecture: everything runs in your browser, and nothing you paste ever leaves your machine.
Open the tools → The pathsCareers, salaries & the CIA
Role deep-dives from staff auditor to CAE, salary guides, and a clear-eyed take on certifications — what the CIA exam costs, how long it takes, and whether it’s worth it for you.
See the career guides →The people behind it
Who writes this
Internal Audit Guide is researched, written, and maintained by practicing internal auditors — people who have spent more than a decade inside multinational institutions including Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), Barclays, American Express, Royal Bank of Canada, ING, and Gap Inc., working across finance and banking, retail, technology, and manufacturing, with academic roots at the University of California and The Claremont Colleges.
Guides are published under the site’s name rather than personal bylines. That’s deliberate: the writing draws on current, real audit work, and keeping the site independent of any employer is what lets it stay specific and candid. Every claim still has to survive the test that matters — would this hold up in front of a reviewer, a regulator, or an audit committee?
The site is independent. It is not owned by, sponsored by, or affiliated with any audit firm, software vendor, training provider, or professional association. There are no ads and no sponsored content — when a guide recommends an approach, that’s a professional judgment, not a placement.
Editorial standards
How the guides are written
The bar every guide has to clear, in four commitments.
Checked against the source
Guides work from the standards and rules they describe — the IIA’s Global Internal Audit Standards, COSO’s frameworks, and regulators’ own handbooks from the OCC, the Federal Reserve, the FFIEC, and the Basel Committee — with links out so you can verify claims yourself.
Written from the field
Explanations start where the work actually happens: what a reviewer flags, what a regulator asks, where a walkthrough falls apart. Templates and examples come from doing the work, not from summarizing other blogs.
Revisited, not abandoned
When the ground moves — a new standard, a renamed framework, a changed exam syllabus — affected guides get reworked rather than left to rot. The library is a working reference, not an archive.
Errors get fixed, fast
No paywall means no sunk-cost defensiveness. When a reader or a re-read surfaces a mistake, the fix ships and the guide moves on. If you spot something wrong, say so — the site gets better because people push on it.
For writers, teachers & teams
Cite, quote, or feature this work
Everything on Internal Audit Guide may be quoted and cited with attribution — by journalists covering audit and governance, professors and training programs, audit teams building internal methodology, and anyone writing about the profession. Link to the guide you used; that’s the whole ask.
Internal Audit Guide, “[guide title],” internalauditguide.com.Classroom and internal use are welcome without asking permission: assign guides in coursework, drop tool links into your methodology, excerpt with credit. If you need a practitioner’s read on an internal-audit question for something you’re writing, start with the A–Z index — the answer is usually already there, with sources.
The whole library is open.
300+ guides, four tools, every framework explained by people who use them — free, ungated, and independent. Start anywhere; it all connects.
Internal Audit Guide · internalauditguide.com