Chief Audit Executive (CAE)

The dual reporting line is the structural protection of independence: functionally to the board or audit committee — which approves the charter, the plan and the budget, and decides on the CAE’s appointment and removal — and administratively to senior management for day-to-day matters.

Where that line is weak, everything downstream weakens with it. A CAE whose objectives are set and reviewed solely by the CFO or CEO is, whatever the charter says, in a different job.

The role is where the tensions of modernisation land in practice. The CAE decides how far the function may go towards operating tooling before independence is compromised, whether agentic work is admissible in the file and under what supervision, and how to answer an audit committee asking why coverage is unchanged after a platform purchase. None of these have settled professional answers yet, which means the CAE is making policy rather than following it — and would do well to document the reasoning at the time rather than reconstruct it under challenge later.