Wellcome innovations
Organisation-wide culture audits and a project to demystify internal audit’s work were the focal points of Wellcome Trust’s winning nomination for the Audit & Risk Award for Outstanding Team – Third Sector in 2024. Ernest Ofei, Head of Internal Audit at Wellcome Trust, explains what his team has achieved.
Funding innovative scientific breakthroughs that create a healthier future is the fundamental purpose of the Wellcome Trust – so it is fitting that its internal audit team won an Audit & Risk Award for its success improving organisational fitness and its ability to face future challenges.
With an endowment of £36.8bn and a remit to support scientific and research to solve “the most urgent health challenges facing humanity”, the Trust requires strong internal audit capabilities. However, the team is relatively new. It was created in 2016 and now comprises just 15 people, plus outsourced support.
Despite its size, the team requires specialist knowledge of topics from scientific research and asset management, to museums, commercial activities, property development, and education. It is also a diverse team, with members with origins from Australia, Ghana, America, Sierra Leone, Italy, France, Nigeria, the UK, Vietnam, South Africa and Hungary. Ernest Ofei, Head of Internal Audit at Wellcome Trust, believes this “cultural richness” contributes to the team’s stakeholder management capabilities and problem-solving skills, and has led to innovative solutions and “comprehensive audit approaches”.
Ofei joined the Trust in 2021. The Trust needed someone with financial services experience, who also understood business and the charitable sector so he was seconded from EY, as the Interim Head of Internal Audit on a 12-month contract.
Once in the role, Ofei saw opportunities to increase internal audit’s scope and maturity. He also enjoyed working with the Trust’s Board, which included financial and political leaders such as Dame Amelia Fawcett, currently lead director of US investment bank State Street Corporation, and has held a host of eminent City roles. She told him that the Wellcome Trust was about to go through significant organisational changes to support the delivery of its new strategy, therefore the Head of Internal Audit role would be a great opportunity.
Ofei also spoke to other board members, including the Chair, Julia Gillard, former Prime Minister of Australia, who reinforced Fawcett’s message and added that the function would have the full backing of the board. A further clincher was his “amazing team”, of four people who were “super sharp and excellent at what they did” and who, he says, laid the foundations of everything internal audit has since achieved.
Organisation and re-organisation
The Wellcome Trust has gone through a significant re-organisation in the past three years with the appointment of Julia Gillard as the new Chair of the Board and recent appointment of a new CEO. As a result, Ofei expanded and developed the internal audit team’s capabilities and scope at a time of rapid organisational change.
The Trust has multiple direct subsidiaries, including the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a genomics research institute, and Wellcome Leap, which funds innovative, unconventional health programmes. It is home to the Wellcome Collection, a free museum and library at the heart of London exploring the past, present and future of health. It also has an in-house investment team managing and growing the endowment.
Each subsidiary has its own governance structure and board. Ofei says that internal audit being sited across the entire business gives it unique abilities to help the various boards and executive “unpick the complexities and focus on what matters”. In addition to the crucial financial assurance that internal audit team provides over the programmes that receive funding, the team has begun to seek assurance over other areas such as diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) and culture/conduct.
Maturity and demystification
The new internal audit team set goals to enhance its methodology, “demystify” internal audit, align with the Standards and complete an external quality assessment (EQA). It first embarked on a series of presentations to the Trust’s functions and subsidiaries to educate managers about internal audit’s role and the three lines model.
One key issue was to raise the importance of closing management actions. By providing training on what good management actions look like, introducing management dashboards showing the status of live actions, and making executive management jointly responsible with action owners, they have significantly reduced the number of outstanding actions.
The EQA praised the team’s leadership in the organisation at a time of rapid growth. Ongoing quality assessment work has now been outsourced to ensure that its quarterly reviews are independent and objective, and can support continuous improvement.
Culture
During its reorganisation, the Trust formally committed to becoming an inclusive employer, setting clear, transparent and consistent criteria for hiring and career development. The internal audit team embraced this and introduced “blind” shortlisting procedures, which excluded names and personal details, and set out to attract direct applications from a broader pool of candidates. Ofei believes this has helped them to hire the “richest mix of people” to build “an exceptional team”. Unusually, they used the same processes when looking for a co-source provider.
Everyone in the internal audit team undertook personality tests and insights sessions to examine their preferred working styles and understand more about diverse thinking and neurodiversity. “It is interesting how people adapt their working styles when they know how they work best,” Ofei says.
The team has hitherto hired highly skilled, experienced internal auditors, not trainees, but is now looking at developing internships and traineeships.
The team’s experiences were used as a pilot study for similar policies in the wider organisation. “It did create additional work, but I believe it gave us a more diverse pool of applicants,” Ofei says.
Organisational culture was another explicit focus, so the internal audit team began to consider the enablers of culture as part of every audit. The Trust’s new head of culture found that the organisation had over 80 definitions of its cultural principles and used inconsistent language around these. These were condensed into clearly defined values and principles that can be applied across different teams at all levels.
The internal audit team started looking at whether the culture in each audited entity was aligned with Wellcome Trust’s desired culture. They considered issues such as tone from the top, leadership and risk behaviours, how teams worked together and talent management. They also assessed the policies and procedures in place and identified data sources, such as the number of risk incidents. Every auditee now gets a secondary rating based on whether the team’s culture is fully, partially or not aligned with the organisation’s culture.
Cultural intelligence from every audit can be combined with insights from focus groups, data sources and official policies to give an overview against the organisation’s newly refreshed values. They plan to conduct a deep-dive culture review every three years.
“This was something the board said they wanted from us,” Ofei says. “The culture rating is now one of the organisation’s KPIs, so ensuring that our audits provide that insight is a board priority.”
In funded institutions, the internal auditors analyse risk culture ratings.
“Our work here has been very well received and directors have been engaged even though it has created many actions for them,” Ofei says. “We have worked hard to explain why this helps them. There can be scepticism about auditing culture until you start showing real data from, for example, exit interviews, risk incidents and pulse surveys, and they see how it affects them.”
Strategy for the future
The internal audit team now plans to increase its impact further by mapping assurance with the second line and “leveraging” what they do to create more insights.
Its new innovation strategy focuses on increased use of data analytics and an artificial intelligence (AI) tool. Ofei sees technology as crucial to modernising internal audit’s processes. “We have the full backing of the audit committee – they have challenged us to do more,” he says. “I was hugely excited to get this strategy approved, because we want to be leaders in how we use data.”
Ofei adds that winning the Audit & Risk Award helped them to increase the team’s credibility and reputation. “There’s some amazing stuff we can do on the back of the award,” he says.
He found the nomination process useful. “Having to go to the board, the audit committee and the team to get feedback focuses you on what has really made an impact,” he says. “Getting validation from the board and the chair of the audit committee shows whether they think you are achieving what you think you have achieved – it tests whether you are aligned.”
They pulled the nomination together as a team, he adds. “Everyone available came to the award ceremony and we also invited our co-source partners, because it can’t be a transactional relationship.”
The Award was recognised by board members and has started conversations with external organisations that Wellcome Trust works with. “Many stakeholders don’t understand the technical details of what we do, so it’s really useful to be able to say ‘we have evidence that what we’re doing is in line with best practice from our EQA and from the Award’. We’ve also put this into presentations about the function” Ofei says.
Some stakeholders were so generous when writing their endorsements that Ofei had to ask them to cut words to fit the wordcount. “This kind of visible support from the audit committee and the board gives you reassurance when you need to have difficult conversations. Their support in the nomination process was great for the team and for me personally,” Ofei says.
Leaving EY to join Wellcome Trust has given him unexpected opportunities. “Good practice is good practice wherever it is done,” he says. “There have been challenging periods, but we have been able to try things that are different from what is commonly done elsewhere, and we will go on to do more with our new digital strategy.”
Endorsement by Chris Jones, Non Executive Director/Chair Audit and Risk Committee,
Wellcome Trust (until December 2023)
“I have had the privilege of witnessing the team's impact on advancing the risk and control landscape within Wellcome, particularly over the past two years. The internal audit team's work has been consistently of a very high standard, delivering timely, comprehensive, and thoughtful reports with true professionalism. Their insights into key and emerging risks across Wellcome, its subsidiaries and funded institutions have been invaluable, providing a solid foundation for strategic decision-making and assisting management in addressing evolving areas of risk.
The successful outcome of the latest external quality assessment in May 2023 not only reinforced our confidence in the team's capabilities, but also underscores their ability to gain trust and respect among senior management and the board. A standout accomplishment was the completion of a culture audit and implementation of a secondary culture rating on all audits, which has offered crucial insights into organisational culture across multiple dimensions. The team’s culture framework and report were both easy to understand and thorough.
Additionally, the team has showcased their professionalism and integrity by delivering confidential reviews directly to the board on highly sensitive matters, when other organisations may have used third parties. Our trust in Ernest and the team's ability to deliver top-quality work in these challenging areas has been well-founded, resulting in excellent outcomes.”
Entries for the 2025 Audit & Risk Awards are open.