A surprising number of departments that have never been audited

By Gazette Staff

March 9th, 2026

BURLINGTON, ON

Macie Jurczyk,, City Auditor

The City Audit department is small: the Auditor, Macie Jurczyk, and an assistant.

The practice is to do four major audits each year.

Set out below are the audit plans going forward:

Risk Factors and Associated Criteria
The Plan is established based on the assessment of risks and exposures in City services. The assessed inherent risk the total risk without controls or raw risk. The level of inherent risk (as determined through risk factors) is used to ensure significant risks are addressed and there is effective use of audit resources.

Inherent Risk Factors
Risk factors include quantitative and qualitative criteria and attributes used to identify areas of City operations that would benefit most from an internal audit. Inherent risk is determined by considering all the factors; not just an individual factor. However, not all factors are considered equal. A weighting is applied to each factor to reflect their relative importance (which is a matter for judgment) based on business practices, legislation and regulations, and strategic plan.

There are many risk factors that can be used in assessing inherent risk. For example, quantitative criteria may include: size of the budget and payroll, number of employees, value of capital equipment, the time elapsed since the last audit, client satisfaction, and extent of partnering/alliances. Qualitative criteria may include: areas of concern to management, possibility of adverse publicity, complexity of IT infrastructure, the effect of governmental or other regulations, technological innovation and information integrity.  The inherent risk factors must be tailored to the City and its operating environment.

Calculating the Overall Inherent Risk Ranking
The overall inherent risk ranking is calculated using the following formula:

OVERALL INHERENT RISK RANKING SCORE = INHERENT RISK ATTRIBUTE RANKING SCORE x FACTOR WEIGHTING

Risk assessed audit entities will be listed from highest to lowest score.