Summary: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) must maintain effective management control over its collections, returns, and investigations, and ensure integrity among the staff involved. To do this IRS has a principle means of control, the Inspection Service. The Inspection Service is charged with keeping the agency's operations and management under continual scrutiny and appraisal.
Although the internal audit staff is complying with management's directives and contributing to more efficient operations, its role and usefulness are limited in meeting management's needs. The audit staff must direct its efforts primarily to continually monitoring field activites, an unrealistic goal which hinders effective audit planning. The audit approach basically restricts the scope of most audits to a single field office, limits the purpose to determining whether specific operations at that office comply with written instructions, and results in audit reports to field management. The internal audit staff's own efforts for improvement are a step in the right direction, but management needs to supplement these actions.
