4 Ways the Internal Audit Collective Will Provide More Value in 2026

The Internal Audit Collective created and solidified its identity in 2025. 

We are a community of Internal Audit and SOX practitioners committed to helping each other. 

We are driving a world-class conversation on SOX, Internal Audit, Risk, and career development.

We have built a culture that celebrates everyone’s contributions, where people feel safe being open and candid in sharing their insights, questions, challenges, and requests for help.

I couldn’t be any prouder of all we achieved together in 2025. But we can learn from 2025 to make the Internal Audit Collective even more valuable to its members in 2026. 

Sure, we’ll keep learning as we go. But here’s where our vision for 2026 begins: With four key goals.

1. Enabling and Strengthening Connections

In 2025, the Internal Audit Collective’s community platform had:

• 1,800+ unique posts to date 
• 15,000 total comments and likes, including 5,100+ comments
• 10,600+ direct messages (member to member)
• 71% of members active on a monthly basis — putting us in the top 2% of all communities managed by Circle, our community platform (used by 17,000+ communities worldwide)

I’m inspired everyday by the conversations in our forums. But what I’m truly awed by is all the private member-to-member conversations taking place.

Those conversations represent people voluntarily taking their interactions further — offering real help and real connections. 

They’re setting up one-on-ones, initiating collaborations, and building relationships. 

In my experience, most people’s professional networks are primarily made up of current or former colleagues and schoolmates, plus a handful of connections from conferences or other events. 

The Internal Audit Collective is helping to change that for our industry. People are making authentic connections here. 

That’s why continuing to build and reinforce the exceptional culture that supports this kind of relationship-building is a top priority in the Internal Audit Collective’s 2026 vision. 

2. Growing Our Community

The Internal Audit Collective went from zero to 800+ members in 2025. 

I will forever be grateful for how all of you took a leap of faith and leaned in. 

I am regularly humbled by how freely you offer your help, time, and perspectives.

The Internal Audit Collective’s power comes entirely from its members: Real practitioners out there daily doing the work.

However, growing our community is critical to:

• Enrich our perspectives 
• Broaden our reach
• Deepen our resources
• Increase our impact

That’s why we’re trying to grow the collective in three specific ways in 2026.

Diversifying Our Member Base

We plan to diversify our community by:

• Welcoming more international members. Our global footprint is expanding, with members from South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and Europe. We hope to step up this growth. The more diverse our community, the better our ability to provide value to everyone in it.
• Better integrating less experienced auditors. We welcomed a ton of staff, seniors, and managers to the collective in 2025, but these members are often less engaged — maybe worrying about the optics of asking for help (or asking the “wrong” question). The Internal Audit Collective’s Community Advisory Group will collaborate on ideas for better engaging and supporting our less experienced auditors. 

Growing Our Core Team

Right now, the Internal Audit Collective’s operations are run by two full-time employees: me and the incredible, patient, and endlessly resourceful Priscilla Serrano, our Director of Customer Success and Operations. 

Beyond that, Heather Reagan helps part-time with our articles and eBooks, and an amazing group of paid and volunteer instructors, group leaders, presenters, and thought leaders support our courses, content, and events.

To make our operations sustainable, however, we need help in key areas:

• We’re building out five Advisory Groups. This group comprises volunteer leaders in data analytics, SOX, AI, Internal Audit, and Community and are tasked to help the development and delivery practical “how to” resources and solutions (e.g., instructions, playbooks, plug-and-play content, templates, eBooks), programming (e.g., targeted community events, member-only training), and other ways to improve the experience of being a Collective member. 

They’ll enlist and collaborate with other Collective members in their work. 

Have an idea for a domain you’d like to help lead? Awesome — let me know. 

• We hope to hire another full-time employee to help with community management. We have so many ideas for the community, but Priscilla and I can only do so much. However, paying another full-time salary requires more resources… meaning more memberships. 

January Membership Sprint

That’s why we’re starting 2026 with a sprint goal: hitting 1,000 members by January 31, 2026. 

A lot of our 2025 growth came from Internal Audit leaders signing up multiple team members (THANK YOU).

Several of these CAEs and SOX leaders mandate that their team members bring the knowledge they get from the Collective (e.g., training courses, webinars, roundtables) back to their entire team. 

In that way, signing up multiple members effectively multiplies the value of membership.

That’s why we’re offering a group-discount promotion through January 31 to support our sprint goal. Here’s how it works — and here’s where new members can sign up:

• Individual membership = $465 for an annual membership
• Two members joining simultaneously = $830 (or $415 per person) 
• Five members joining simultaneously = $365 each ($100 off each)

3. Increasing Specificity — in Direct Response to Community Needs

Our mission is helping Internal Audit and SOX teams solve their real day-to-day problems. 

In 2026, we’re doubling down on this commitment by getting as crazy-specific as we can. 

That means using our webinars, roundtables, articles, and eBooks to hone in on the questions and problems our members care about most.

Here’s how we’ll get more specific in 2026.

Targeted Community Events and Training 

• Serving industry-specific needs. Quarterly industry-specific roundtables (e.g., life sciences, manufacturing) are growing organically, driven by member interest. We’ll help do the legwork for any members seeking to organize one for their industry. 
• Monthly cybersecurity roundtables. Let’s make 2026 the year Internal Audit moves past general cybersecurity audits to develop more specific, relevant, valuable audit projects focused on organizations’ most important cybersecurity risks. Our monthly cybersecurity roundtables hosted by Dave Malcom will give members the opportunity to share their challenges, ask questions, get feedback on audit plans, and more. 
• Gen AI “Prompting Practice” office hours. Inspired by a leading practice used by teams who are leading in AI implementation, starting Jan 22, we will hold weekly “Prompting Practice” office hours. Internal Audit Collective members who have developed successful AI prompts will (1) demo the prompt, (2) give everyone on the call time to try the prompt live on their own computers, and (3) provide help and answer any/all questions. We’re initially planning 10 sessions and will then 
• Roundtables on top-ten audit plan topics. Drawing on our “What’s on your audit plan for 2026?” benchmarking survey, different Internal Audit leaders will lead sessions focused on each of the top-ten topics. Sessions will take place between January and June. 

Additionally, I am over-the-moon excited to announce our second free course available for Internal Audit Collective members.

Data analytics skills have become a core capability for modern auditors. That’s why we’ve decided to make DRIVE, our 16-credit analytics course, free for all members in 2026. This is in addition to our  SOX Base Camp course also being free for all members.

Increasing Participation in our Benchmarking Surveys

If this was an audit report, we’d definitely note benchmarking as an area for improvement.

The bottom line with benchmarking: The more responses, the better the benchmarking. That’s why we aim to drive higher member participation in our benchmarking surveys in 2026. 

We’ve done some solid benchmarking in 2026. While anyone can download our benchmarking reports, Internal Audit Collective members also have access to the raw survey data, letting them hone in on the areas most relevant to them. 2025 benchmarking included:

• The State of Internal Audit With SOX Responsibilities was a first-of-its-kind survey examining the day-to-day realities and goals of Internal Audit teams with SOX responsibilities. The data enabled us to identify key trends highlighting six enablers for increasing value and maturity, including controls rationalization, analytics, External Audit reliance, technology optimization, and more.
• What’s on Your Audit Plan for 2026? (coming soon!). This work-in-progress benchmarking survey will give everyone a clearer view on common audit plan topics, including topics that teams are covering more or less frequently.

4. Highlighting More Member Expertise

We want to use our platform to help more of our members share their how-to guidance, solutions, expertise, and perspectives. 

We want to get as many members involved as possible. 

Where can you share relevant how-to expertise? In what areas do you want to be seen as an industry thought leader? Let me and Heather know. 

We can feature something you wrote, help you write something, or pull ideas and inspiration from an event you were part of.

I post new blogs weekly via the Internal Audit Collective’s newsletter. During the latter half of the year, most of my blogs have been inspired by conversations in the collective and member presentations in classes and roundtables. 

And well, I’m humble enough to know it: The more I draw on members’ expertise, the better the articles get. 

Let’s Make 2026 Amazing

These are the goals I’ve outlined. 

But the Internal Audit Collective is quite literally nothing without you, its members. So it’s up to ALL of us to decide what 2026 will bring. 

What’s your idea? 

How can your experience be improved? What other topics can we focus on and how? What assets do you need? 

I’m thankful for each and every one of you. Thank you for being part of the Internal Audit Collective. Now, help me make the collective even more valuable in 2026. 

How can you help TODAY? Help us promote the Internal Audit Collective — on LinkedIn, in your industry, and inside your organization. Share an insight from the Collective that’s helped you, an article that inspired you, or the how-to guidance you’ve actually tried. 

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