The Gartner 2023 Audit Plan Hot Spots Report identifies the top 12 risk focus areas for Chief Audit Executives (CAEs) to help them identify risks to their organisations and plan audit coverage for the coming year.
2023 audit plan hot spots
- Cyberthreats
- IT Governance
- Data Governance
- Third-Party Risk Management
- Organisational Resilience
- Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)
- Supply Chain
- Macroeconomic Volatility
- Workforce Management
- Cost Pressures
- Culture
- Climate Degradation
- Rethinking Resilience
“Cyberthreats remain a perennial concern for CAEs, yet the drivers of this risk have evolved as a result of new geopolitical conflicts and the heightened prospect of state-sponsored attacks,” said Leslee McKnight, vice president for the Gartner legal, risk and compliance practice.
“Mitigation plans need to be revisited to reflect the evolution of the risk and prepare the organisation to meet increasingly stringent disclosure requirements in the event of a breach.”
Leslee McKnight
Adjacent hot spots, such as ensuring adequate IT governance and third-party risk management, contribute to a challenging outlook for mitigating the full array of potential cyber threats facing organisations in 2023.
While most CAEs indicated they planned to address cybersecurity in their plans next year, only 42% of survey respondents expressed a high level of confidence in their ability to provide adequate assurance in this area.
Three themes driving risk in 2022
Three key themes drove the risks this year including a “renationalisation of resources” and a “triple squeeze” of growing cost pressures, supply chain risks and labour scarcity. The final theme, the need to “rethink organisational resilience,” is unique as its own distinct risk area and a driver of a multitude of other risks.
The ability to withstand crises and disruptions may become more critical next year, and many organisations still take a limited view of resilience, mostly focused on business continuity and IT disaster recovery.
This narrow view of resilience fails to account for additional risks impacting resilience including greatly increased economic volatility and impacts from climate degradation.
Themes for 2023
McKnight says rethinking resilience is a key theme that underlies a diverse set of risks facing organisations in 2023, including economic volatility, climate degradation and third-party risk management.
“Currently less than one-third of audit leaders are highly confident in their team’s ability to provide assurance over organisational resilience risk, and more concerning, less than half plan to cover organisational resilience in audit activities in the coming year,” she added.
McKnight further noted that the increasingly interconnected risk landscape increases the chances for cascading risks, where one risk causes additional risks to manifest for an organisation, a scenario that few organisations are actively planning against today.
