Cal Poly’s Auditing and Consulting Services (ACS) are a huge factor in the campus’s operations. Established in Feb. 2019, the department independently provides objective audits or inspections of the organization’s accounts. These audits and consultations are conducted by a team of two, Assistant Vice President of Audit and Consulting Services Dan DiPaola and Senior Internal Auditor Stephanie DaRosa.
The team started from scratch, as there had been no program like ACS at Cal Poly beforehand. DiPaola had around 23 years of experience in internal audit before joining the department in 2019. DaRosa, a San Luis Obispo native, began working for university campus programs at Cal Poly six months prior to joining the internal audit team.
Cal Poly is the only campus in the CSU internal audit function that has its own campus-wide audit committee. The group comprises eight committee members including Jeffrey Armstrong, Cynthia Villa, Keith Humphrey, Cynthia Jackson-Elmoore, Bill Britton, Mike Applegate, Angie Kraetsch and DiPaola.
ACS serves as a watchdog, overseeing that everyone takes the right course of action. The team reviews risk management, ensuring the university maintains fiscal responsibility, community safety and meets compliance standards with the CSU and state regulations. They identify the strong areas and ones that need to be improved in university functions.
DiPaola and DaRosa offer objective advice and insight into the institution with a systematic and disciplined evaluation approach, increasing effective governance and control processes and working on special projects by request. In addition, DiPaola and DaRosa do advisory services or reviews that are less formal than traditional audits.
The team also forms a communication network between external auditors and departments that are being reviewed. They work with multiple areas of the campus and co-develop effective plans and strategies and are available to help anyone with internal functions as well as educate on internal audits.
ACS provides various types of services to all areas within the University and its auxiliaries. To learn more about ACS, visit the internal audit page here.