مسار بولونيا
AR
Research Hussein Mohammed Neamah
Reducing Management Pressure: A Study on the Role of Internal Auditor Autonomy in Improving Audit Outcomes
2026 مجلة جامعة الكوت
Internal audit work is eroded under internal pressure from management by scope limits, timing overlap and subtle backlash risk. It is for this reason that this study aims to test the influence of internal auditor independence on management overpressure and the influence of internal auditor independence on audit output. In this paper, the notion of autonomy relates to a governing condition that protects independence in the areas of planning, data collection, reporting, and follow up. Benefiting from an experimental research capacity, the study adopts a quantitative design of simulated organizational data representing mediocrity in the spread of governance arrangement common within the expanding landscape of corporate governance within the Middle East in relation to audit committee strength, reporting lines, budget control and audit protection policies. Our model associates the autonomy to three types of outcomes. This covers issue detection, evidence sufficiency and report clarity, all of which belong to the domain of audit quality outcomes. Cycle time and speed of closure are timeliness results. The result of remediation is the rate of implementation and the degree of recurrence reduction. In analyses, reliability tests, correlation analysis, and multivariate regression are added, then a path or structural model test is carried out to test the direct and indirect effects. In fact, we see that greater autonomy does map to better overall performance, for quality, timeliness and remediation results. Significant effects emerge when the chief audit executive has a functional reporting level to the audit committee, when the audit committee approves the audit plan, and when management is unable to influence the resourcing of internal audit. Improvements in outcomes due to mediation are modeled structurally whereby autonomy (A) translates into less management pressure (MP), which in turn has direct effects on outcomes (O) (e.g. The findings translate into pragmatic governance interventions. Boards can help by: Leveraging Audit Committee Authority, creating protected channels for escalation and aligning the committee with internal audit budgets. Future work should validate the model in the field, expand the metrics to include audits for cybersecurity and ESG, and compare results across regulated vs nonregulated sectors. Keywords: Internal audit, Auditor autonomy, Management pressure, Audit committee, governance, Audit outcomes