INTEGRATING INTERNAL AUDIT RESULTS INTO MANAGEMENT DECISIONS AND IMPROVING THE EFFECTIVENESS ASSESSMENT SYSTEM

The article examines the integration of internal audit results into management decision-making in commercial banks and the improvement of the system for assessing the effectiveness of the audit function. It is established that the conventional pair of evidence criteria — sufficiency and appropriateness — is oriented towards justifying the auditor's own conclusion and says nothing about whether that conclusion is capable of supporting a management decision, with the result that the point at which audit value is either realised or lost remains unmeasured. The author proposes a method for evaluating internal audit evidence against three criteria — sufficiency, reliability and impact — and for systematising it in a unified evidence register. The method introduces an evidence quality index computed as EQI = 0.35 Su + 0.35 Re + 0.30 Im, five-point anchors for each criterion, and a decision conversion rate. Tested on conditional data, it revealed a pronounced relationship between the reliability of evidence and its influence on management: evidence with a reliability score of 4 or above produced an average impact score of 4.00, while evidence scoring 2 or below produced an average of 1.33.