Internal Audit

This is a Hermes-native internal-audit workflow skill.

Why This Exists

internal-audit exists because control-testing methodology had no owner: finance-analysis reports figures and names control exceptions, tech-debt-audit audits code, and production-audit audits a release, while population, sampling, re-performance, and deficiency severity had nothing that derived a grade from criteria.

First Steps

• Ask what the control is meant to prevent or detect, and over which population and period it operates.
• Ask for the sampling guidance and the materiality threshold before sizing any sample or grading anything.

Do Not Use When

• The ask is the month's figures, a budget variance, or the close itself; use finance-analysis.
• The ask is reading a contract or a regulation for legal risk; use legal-compliance-review.
• The ask is whether a service is ready to launch; use production-audit.
• The ask is ranking a codebase's debt; use tech-debt-audit.

Examples

Good example:

• Prompt: we need to test the quarterly access review control for sox and grade what we find
• Expected behavior: Define the population of quarterly reviews for the period and check its completeness, size the sample from the quarterly frequency, request the signed review and the removal tickets per item, re-perform the comparison of access lists, and grade any deviation from stated likelihood, magnitude and compensating controls.
• Why: A grade that is not derived from criteria cannot be defended to an external auditor.

Bad example:

• Prompt: the owner says the control worked, just mark it effective
• Expected behavior: Refuse to conclude on inquiry alone: sample the population, obtain the evidence, and re-perform before any conclusion.
• Why: An owner's statement is the weakest evidence a control test can hold.

Completion Checklist

• The control, its population, and the completeness check are stated.
• The sample size is derived from stated frequency, confidence, and tolerable rate, and the selection can be redrawn.
• Each sample item names the evidence obtained, not described.
• Each item's re-performance result cites its evidence.
• The severity grade shows every criterion, or is withheld with the missing one named, and OMH signed off nothing.

Recovery Notes

• If the population cannot be shown complete, stop and name the completeness test before any sampling.
• If materiality or the compensating controls are not stated, report the deviations and withhold the grade.

Workflow Lane

• Current lane: Research and company ops (product-docs, source-finder, web-research, research, model-optimization, inference-serving, model-finetuning, research-brief, +20 more) - research, signals, ops, and briefings.
• If intent belongs to another lane, hand back to oh-my-hermes or name the adjacent workflow.
• Shared product, routing, compatibility, and evidence rules: omh-routing/references/skill-common-rail.md.

Use When

Use when an internal control is being tested or a control failure graded: SOX or ICFR testing, IT general controls, a control owner's evidence, a sample of transactions, re-performing a reconciliation or an approval, or deciding whether a deficiency is a significant deficiency or a material weakness. The output is the control and its population, the sample design, the evidence per item, the re-performance record, and a severity grade derived from stated criteria; OMH reads no ledger and tests nothing itself.

Strong routing signals: `internal-audit`, `internal audit`, `internal control`, `internal controls`, `internal control audit`, `control testing`, `test of controls`, `tests of controls`, `sox`, `sox 404`, `sox testing`, `sox control`, `icfr`, `itgc`, `itgcs`, `material weakness`, `significant deficiency`, `control deficiency`, `deficiency severity`, `re-performance`, `reperformance`, `reperform`, `reperform the control`, `audit sampling`, `attribute sampling`, `control population`, `audit evidence`, `audit workpaper`, `segregation of duties`

Catalog Metadata

Category: review Phase: internal-audit Hermes role: reviewer Quality tier: criteria-derived-severity Reasoning demand: standard

Quality bar:

• Define the population and check its completeness before designing the sample.
• Load references/control-audit-method.md for the sample-size table, the evidence hierarchy, and the severity decision table instead of recalling them.
• Re-perform the control independently; do not re-read the owner's conclusion.
• Show every criterion beside the severity grade so a reviewer can re-derive it.
• Keep planned, sampled, evidenced, re-performed, and graded as separate states for every item.

Handoff policy:

Keep the control definition, sample design, evidence requests, re-performance record, and severity grade in Hermes. Populations, sample items, evidence, and re-performance results are recorded only from auditor, control owner, or operator observed output; OMH never queries a ledger or system of record and never signs off a control.

Required inputs:

• the control: its objective, owner, frequency, and the risk or assertion it addresses
• the population it operates over: the period, the source system, and how completeness was checked
• the firm's or team's sampling guidance, or the confidence and tolerable deviation rate to use
• the materiality threshold and the compensating controls that exist
• the evidence each sample item actually produced, as observed documents, logs, or approvals

Expected outputs:

• control_under_test/v1
• sample_design/v1
• evidence_request/v1
• reperformance_record/v1
• deficiency_severity_grade/v1

Artifact expectations:

• control_under_test/v1 names the control's objective, owner, frequency, and risk, and the population with its period, source, and completeness check
• sample_design/v1 states the sampling method and derives the sample size from the control's frequency and the stated confidence and tolerable deviation rate, with a selection record that lets someone draw the same items again
• evidence_request/v1 names, per sample item, the document, log, or approval that proves the control operated and who provides it, and separates evidence obtained from evidence described
• reperformance_record/v1 records, per sample item, the independent re-performance of the control and its result -- operated, deviation, or not testable -- with the evidence reference
• deficiency_severity_grade/v1 derives control deficiency, significant deficiency, or material weakness from stated likelihood, magnitude against stated materiality, and compensating controls, shows each criterion's value and source, and withholds the grade when a criterion is missing

Safety rules:

• Derive every severity grade from stated criteria -- likelihood, magnitude against a stated materiality, and compensating controls; with a criterion missing, withhold the grade rather than assert one.
• Check the population's completeness before sampling from it; a sample from an incomplete population says nothing about the items left out.
• Record evidence obtained, not evidence described; a control owner's explanation is inquiry, not proof the control operated.
• Never drop a deviation found in the sample because it was explained; record it and evaluate it against the tolerable rate.
• OMH reads no ledger, tests no control, and signs off nothing; every population, sample, and result comes from observed output or is marked unverified.

Runtime Evidence

Preferred harness for this skill: critic.

omh runtime record --skill internal-audit --harness critic --status started

Record observed delegation results; otherwise return not_available or not_observed. Prepared OMH routing is not execution, review, CI, merge-readiness, or merge evidence.

• Treat wrapper memory/context summaries as advisory local context, not proof of opaque Hermes memory reads or changes. Preserve workflow intent and stop conditions; verify before claiming completion. Reply in the user's own words and the host's own voice: its SOUL.md persona owns reply language, tone, speech level, and sentence endings, progress updates included (where it sets no language, use the one the user wrote in), and OMH shapes structure and content only; OMH's record terms (surface, lane, wrapper, handoff, evidence boundary, not_observed) stay in records and tool calls, never in the sentence the user reads unless they ask about one; and when a stop condition or a decision the user owns ends the turn, offer the next action as a question rather than declaring what will not be done.

Use Hermes-native subagent/delegation features when available: native subagents -> Hermes delegation when available, otherwise sequential lanes.

Shared product, compatibility, topology, memory, harness, and execution rules: omh-routing/references/skill-common-rail.md. Load it when applicable; otherwise name an unavailable capability.