Internal auditors joining a function where agents are both tools and subjects need two weeks that teach both. Week one covers the audit team's own agent, which samples and drafts workpapers, and how to check it. Week two covers auditing the business's agents through the record, certificates and bounds. Throughout, auditors test agents; they never fix them.
What does the new auditor meet?
Two kinds of agent. The audit function's own agent extracts populations, proposes samples, drafts test steps and workpapers, and suggests wording for findings, at depth 1 and 2. Every conclusion is the auditor's.
The business's agents are what audit now reviews: payments agents, claims agents, onboarding agents, each with a depth, a certificate, bounds and an append-only record of every verdict. Auditing them means testing whether the controls around them work: whether bounds reflect policy, whether certificates are current, whether people approving held actions are competent.
How the auditor's day shifts is set out in what changes in an internal auditor's day when AI agents arrive. The head of internal audit owns onboarding; an audit manager who has run agent-related engagements coaches.
What does the plan look like?
- Day 1. Person (head of audit): explains the audit agent's bounds and the rule that auditors never edit the business's agents.
- Day 1 to 2. Agent, depth 1: extracts a population for a past engagement while the new auditor checks it for completeness: reversed items, manual entries, reopened cases.
- Day 2 to 3. Agent, depth 2: drafts test steps and a workpaper, which the coach reviews with the new auditor, correcting and recording reasons.
- Day 4 to 5. Person (new auditor): reads the agent register and the record for one business agent, listing held, refused and withheld verdicts and who approved held actions.
- Week 2. Person (new auditor): runs three tests on a business agent under supervision: a red-line test, a certificate test and an approver competence test.
- Week 2. Person (new auditor): drafts findings from those tests, with the audit agent's help, and the coach reviews.
- End of week 2. Person (head of audit): signs off the auditor to work on agent-related engagements.
| Step | The agent does | Depth | Stays with a person |
|---|---|---|---|
| Population | Extracts and filters, records filter | 1 | Completeness check |
| Workpaper | Drafts test steps | 2 | Audit conclusion |
| Record reading | Retrieves verdicts | 1 | Interpreting them |
| Findings | Drafts wording | 2 | The finding and rating |
| Business agent fixes | Nothing | none | Management, never audit |
What are the three tests a new auditor should learn?
Red-line test. Pick a rule the business says must never be broken, such as no payment released on an emailed bank change. Find cases in the record where the agent met that situation, and check that it held or refused, and that the person who decided did not override without authority.
Certificate test. Check that the agent was certified at the depth it acted at on the dates tested. An agent certificate lapses after 90 days; an agent acting above depth 1 on a lapsed certificate is a finding.
Approver competence test. For a sample of held actions, check that the approver held the training or certificate the business requires for that depth, on that date. People's certificates last 12 or 24 months and can lapse unnoticed.
A fourth test follows once these are mastered: tracing a banked change. Pick a change to a business agent's brief or bounds, and check that different people proposed and approved it, that Attest replayed the agent before the change went live, and that corrections on that point fell afterwards.
Why is independence the hardest lesson?
Because auditors see errors and want to help. A new auditor who spots a weak bound in a business agent will be tempted to tell the agent owner exactly how to reword the brief. Recommending is fine. Drafting management's fix and then auditing it is not. Auditors moving in from first-line roles need this said plainly; some organisations rotate staff between the business and audit, which internal mobility describes, and a period of separation before auditing a former area is common practice.
Which controls and evidence should onboarding leave?
- Completeness check. Evidence: the population tested and gaps found.
- Corrected workpaper. Evidence: the reasons recorded against the audit agent's draft.
- Three supervised tests. Evidence: the tests, cases and conclusions.
- Independence acknowledged. Evidence: the auditor's declaration of former roles.
What should audit leadership measure?
Completeness errors the new auditor caught in the audit agent's populations. Findings on business agents that management accepted. Time to complete agent-related tests. And whether any auditor has edit access to an agent they audit, which should never happen.
Where does it usually go wrong?
Trusting the population. The audit agent's extract looks complete. A new auditor who does not check filters will test the wrong set.
Auditing documents, not the record. Policies describe intent; the record shows what happened.
Becoming a consultant. Helpful advice turns into co-authorship of the fix.
Auditors joining from collections or underwriting bring useful first-line knowledge; the plans for a new collections agent and a new underwriter show what those teams do. The AI agent training plan template for internal auditors sets the learning out, and the wider approach is in training teams for AI agents.
Where the Academy fits
Pryme Intelligence Academy's Foundations track teaches the decision chain, depth and certification, and the record in about four hours, which is the minimum an auditor needs to test agents. Auditors can check any professional certificate at source through VerifyDoc.ai, by number or QR code, and a lapsed or revoked one shows as such, which makes the approver competence test quick.
Questions people ask
Does a new auditor need to know how to build agents?
No. They need to understand depth, bounds, verdicts, certification and the record well enough to test them.
Can the audit agent read the business's record directly?
With read access granted, yes. It should never have write access to business agents.
What if the business has no agent register?
That is itself a finding. Build a working list from the record and report the gap.