Introduction
A virus first appearing in Wuhan province of China in December 2019 and which is too small for the human eye to see has turned into a phenomenon that has affected all the humanity within six months.
This virus, which was declared pandemic and named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO) as of 11 March 2020 due to its rate of spread and the threat it poses, has been reported to have affected all the countries in the world. The outbreak has been considered as a global crisis, as it affects people’s living standards and quality and has multidimensional macro-effects such as economy, communication, tourism, transportation, sports, supply and even international relations.This global threat posed by COVID-19 outbreak around the world is considered to be the biggest crisis in modern history in terms of its impact after World War II— when compared to SARS, HIV, MERS, Ebola, Malaria outbreaks, etc. (ILO 2020:2). In addition, some points out that the impact of the mentioned global crisis, which is still ongoing, will be heavier and irreversible when compared to the two major events World War I and II that affected the world negatively in the last hundred years. There are approaches that its effects will be more negative and irreversible compared to World Wars. These inferences provide insight into the size and comprehensiveness of threats posed by the COVID-19 outbreak not only for human health, but also for organisations.
Mentioned threat is mostly about the physical distribution of employees in the workplace and incompatibility of employee and customer relations with the “social distancing criteria”. In this process, the ability of the organisations to survive and ensure their continuity depends on the timing and effective implementation of the measures to be taken against the crisis, in which the management assume great responsibilities. The role of internal audit, which is a strategic control factor in fulfilling these responsibilities, which are evaluated within the scope of crisis management, has not been clearly defined in the literature.
This study aims to determine the role of internal audit activity before, during and after the crisis. The study consists of two parts. In the first part, in order to evaluate the crisis environment caused by COVID-19, conceptual information about the concept of crisis and the crisis process is provided and an assessment is made on the crisis management that organisations will implement during the crisis. In the second part, the duties of the internal auditors in the crisis process phases are examined based on the COVID-19 outbreak example in order to help the organisations efficiently cope with the crisis during such a large-scale global crisis.
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