The facts are still unfolding from the Lehman Brothers story. As a reminder, they filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008 - the largest bankruptcy filing in US history, with Lehman holding over $600bn in assets.

The story raises important questions for internal auditors, and should be required reading and consideration for every internal audit executive.

This week, my company, SAP, hosted a roundtable where three executives talked about the successful implementation of solutions for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) at their companies and answered questions from media. The technology that these companies used was from SAP, but other vendors have products that would have produced similar results.

If you haven’t already read at least the executive summary of the bank examiner’s report regarding Lehman Brothers' demise, you should. A New York Times story covers some of the main points and contains links to the 2,200-page document.

Peter Millar (of ACL Services) is leading a small team (Brad Ames of HP and myself) in a project to update the Global Technology Audit Guide (GTAG) on Continuous Auditing. This is a routine update, such as we go through for all IIA guidance, but it provides the opportunity to upgrade the current guidance.

How about these as attributes of an ideal internal audit department?

I want to take two views in answering this question — the first is from day-to-day living, and the second is from The IIA's International Standards for the Professional Practice of Internal Auditing (Standards).