Audit Fatigue Is a Feature, Not a Bug (Of How You Operate)

Last quarter, a CFO told me she'd started blocking calendar time labeled "audit fatigue recovery."

I asked if she meant it as a joke.

She said no. She said it's a recurring meeting, every other Friday afternoon, ninety minutes. She sits with a coffee and explicitly does not answer audit-related questions for that block. It's the only way she gets through her actual job.

I stared at her for a moment. Then I asked who else has it on their calendar. She said: the controller, the head of revenue, the GC's deputy, the head of IT operations, two business unit presidents, and her chief of staff. They all coordinate so the meetings don't overlap with each other's audit interview slots.

Nine senior executives at one mid-cap company, all blocking explicit time on their calendars to recover from us.

I left that meeting wondering how I'd contributed to this. And then I started paying attention.

The problem

Audit fatigue is the most-named, least-diagnosed condition in our profession.

You hear it constantly. "My team is fatigued." "The business is fatigued." "The third line is overwhelming us." The reflex response — from CAEs, from compliance leaders, from risk officers — is to apologize, soften the engagement load, and promise to be lighter next quarter. It's empathetic. It changes nothing.

Because fatigue is not the disease. Fatigue is the symptom. The disease is an operating model that, when run at the volume modern GRC requires, exhausts its hosts.

Once you see this, it's hard to unsee. The audit team in 2026 is doing roughly twenty times the work it did in 2010. The business has not grown twenty times. The number of stakeholders we touch has not multiplied. Yet our demands on those stakeholders' time have grown roughly with our workload. We are, structurally, asking the same humans to do twenty times more for us.

Of course they are tired. They are tired because the model has not changed even slightly while its throughput has gone up an order of magnitude.

What it costs

Three things break when stakeholders are chronically fatigued.

First, the quality of the inputs collapses. A tired CFO does not give you precise answers. She gives you the answers that will end the meeting. The walkthrough you conducted in the third week of fiscal close is not the walkthrough you think it is. It is a rushed approximation, performed by someone who is mentally elsewhere. You wrote it up like a clean evidence artifact. It is anything but.

Second, the political access you need disappears. Internal audit's most valuable asset is not its independence; it's its standing invitation to every important conversation in the company. Fatigue erodes that invitation. Slowly at first — your meetings get moved to junior calendars, your questions get answered by emails instead of conversations — then suddenly, when the company faces a real crisis and you find out about it from the press release.

Third, the team becomes complicit in the dysfunction. The auditors notice the fatigue. They start to feel guilty. They soften their findings to make life easier for the people they like. They reduce the rigor of their walkthroughs to spare a friendly controller. Over time, the function loses the spine that justified its existence in the first place. It becomes a polite, exhausted ritual.

I have watched all three of these happen at companies I genuinely admired. None of them were arrogant teams. They were the opposite — diligent, conscientious, well-meaning. They just couldn't see the operating model they were stuck inside.

The amplification

Here's the part I find most depressing.

The standard response to audit fatigue — "let's be more efficient with stakeholder time" — almost always makes things worse. Because the operating model is unchanged, "efficiency" just means cramming the same work into shorter touchpoints. Stakeholders now spend less time per interaction but the interactions are more cognitively demanding, more frequent, and harder to prepare for. They go from tired to angry.

I've seen audit teams spend a year shaving their walkthroughs from sixty minutes to forty-five and discover, at the end of the year, that stakeholder satisfaction scores got worse. Not because the auditors did anything wrong. Because the model was unchanged, and the model is what produces the fatigue.

The "less is more" trap is real.

The solution

The operating model has to change. Three concrete moves, and I'm convinced these are the path.

1. Decouple evidence collection from stakeholder interaction

The single highest-leverage thing your function can do is reduce, by an order of magnitude, the number of times you put a question to a human. Modern GRC platforms can pull most evidence types — system configurations, transaction samples, access reviews, policy versions — automatically and continuously. The walkthrough should not be the moment of evidence collection. The walkthrough should be the moment of interpretation of evidence already collected.

If your team is still asking the controller to send you the same Excel reconciliation every quarter, you are part of the problem. Stop. Build the integration.

2. Replace one-off engagements with continuous engagements

A single 80-hour engagement that consumes the controller's October is roughly five times more fatiguing than the same 80 hours spread invisibly across the year as continuous monitoring. The work is the same. The cognitive load is radically different. Continuous controls monitoring isn't a tool category. It's an operating model that respects stakeholder cognition.

3. Make the agentic layer the primary interface

This is where AI changes the game, and it's not the change you'd predict. The point of agents in GRC is not to replace auditors. It's to absorb the parts of an audit that exhaust stakeholders. An agent asking a controller for three pieces of evidence in a Slack thread, over a Tuesday afternoon, is wildly less fatiguing than the same auditor doing the same thing in a sixty-minute Zoom call on Thursday. Same evidence, same rigor, dramatically lower cognitive cost on the stakeholder.

Teams that have moved to agentic-first engagement have, by the data I've seen, cut stakeholder hours per audit by 60–70% while increasing findings quality. The fatigue, in real terms, goes away.

Closing

I called that CFO back six months later. She'd moved her company to a continuous-monitoring platform with agentic engagement on the audit side. I asked her how the calendar block was holding up.

She laughed. She said the block was still on her calendar, but she'd stopped needing it. She uses the time for a Friday afternoon walk now.

That's the test. *If your stakeholders need recovery time from your function, the function is the problem.* Fix the function. The fatigue evaporates.

The teams that fix this are the teams whose business partners eventually call them voluntarily — not because they have to, but because they trust that the conversation will be cheap, sharp, and worth the time. That's the relationship the rest of us are still working toward.