Skill Improvement Needs of Internal Audit Staff in Agro-Allied Industries in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study was carried out to determine the skill improvement needs of internal audit staff in agro-allied industries in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Six research questions were answered by the study while six null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The population for the study was 161 internal audit staff in registered agro-allied industries in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. The entire population of 161 internal audit staff were surveyed because of its manageable size. Hence, there was no sampling for the study. The instrument for data collection was a structured questionnaire titled: “Questionnaire on Skill Improvement Needs of Internal Audit Staff (QSINIAS) which contained 112 items developed by the researcher from the literature reviewed for the study. The instrument was subjected to face-validation by five experts who were three lecturers from the Department of Business Education, University of Nigeria, Nsukka and two Chartered Accountants from Account and Audit Unit, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The questionnaire was trial tested on 20 internal audit staff from different agro-allied industries in Cross Rivers State, which is outside the study area, to establish the internal consistency of the instrument. The reason for selecting the respondents from the zone is because of the similarity in socio-cultural background of the two States, and also to avoid the use of the same respondents that were used for the study. Cronbach Alpha () Reliability method was used to determine the internal consistency of the instrument which yielded a coefficient of 0.78, 0.84, 0.84, 0.80, 0.76, 0.91 and 0.83 for financial information verification, enterprise risks identification, policy compliant, communication, ICT security and audit report writing skills while reliability coefficient of 0.81 was obtained for the entire instrument. The entire 161 copies of the questionnaires were administered directly to the respondents by the researcher with the help of five research assistants. Out of the 161 copies of the questionnaire administered, 150 copies were duly filled and returned representing 93.2 rate of return. The data collected for this study were analysed using mean and Need Gap Index (NGI) for answering the research questions while t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were employed in testing the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The results showed that internal audit staff of agro-allied industries in Akwa Ibom State needed improvement in some identified skills in financial information verification, enterprise risks identification, policy compliant, communication, ICT security and audit report writing. On the hypotheses tested, the study found that there were no significant differences in the mean ratings of internal auditing staff on their performance in 92 out of the 112 identified skills. Although, there were significant differences in the responses of the internal auditing staff on the remaining 20 skills. Therefore, the study among others recommended that agro-allied industries in Akwa Ibom State should always ensure recruitment of qualified and competent internal auditors for handling internal auditing work in their firms and enterprises, and that there should be regular training and retraining of the internal auditors in areas and skills where improvements were found needed for their proficiency in service delivery in agro-allied firms in Akwa Ibom State.