The purpose of this research is to provide a broad overview of the internal audit function in Switzerland. The goal is to discover whether there is a marketplace for outsourced internal audit service providers. Furthermore, the reasons companies organise the internal audit in a certain way are examined in order to gain a better understanding of the function. This paper aims to investigate the organizational position of the function in Switzerland and whether it aligns with the recommendation of Swiss corporate governance code.

To gain a broad overview of the topic, the literature review chapter of the paper presents secondary data collected from previous literature. Secondly, initial data was collected from different company reports. This information is the foundation and gives an overview of the state of internal audit and its organization within Swiss stock-listed companies. As a third step, an online survey, including 11 questions, was conducted. Finally, one expert interview via email with an internal auditor was conducted to collect more qualitative data about the internal audit function in Switzerland.

The results from the study indicate that even though internal auditing is not mandatory in Switzerland, the majority of the companies do have such a function. In most companies, this is organised internally. Especially among bigger companies this can be observed. The findings suggest that companies that use external support for their internal audit are rather small. This indicates that there is a marketplace for the outsourced internal audit service providers among small companies. Digitalization has increased the influence of technology in internal auditing, and the results suggest that the internal auditors often lack these newly required IT skills. The study concludes that offering assistance with IT audits and data analytics can open opportunities for outsourced internal audit service providers. Especially, the hybrid internal audit model is expected to become more popular. Based on the survey, the main reason for having this type of arrangement is the lack of resources.