Citigroup Internal Audit Hiring Spree
Citigroup announced today that it plans to hire at least 100 additional internal auditors next year, one of the largest single hiring sprees we’ve seen in the field in years. If any audit professionals out there like the banking sector and want a change of pace, here’s your big chance.
Citi already has more than 2,000 employees working in the internal audit function under the direction of Jessica Roos, who joined the company in 2014 and has been chief auditor since 2019. The 100 jobs will be new positions added to the team, not backfills of routine turnover.
“This is a very exciting time for Citi internal audit,” Roos said in a polite and chipper press release announcing the hiring campaign. “We look forward to bringing talented, diverse and solutions-oriented individuals on board to join our team, who will become trusted partners to our businesses across Citi and help deliver on our work to foster a best-in-class risk and controls environment.”
Citi says it wants to base the new hires primarily at operations centers in Jacksonville, Fla. and Wilmington, Del. (The bank also has other internal audit teams in New York, Tampa, and suburban Toronto, so maybe you can bargain on location. Personally, I’d choose Toronto.)
I did a quick search of “internal audit” on Citi’s careers webpage and promptly received more than 2,300 hits, so clearly you can take your time to find a position that tickles your fancy. For example, some of the currently open roles include:
- Senior audit manager for compliance risk management transformation
- Senior audit manager for consumer compliance
- Audit manager for technology infrastructure
- Senior vice president of finance transformation reporting (“I’m here to report on how you’re transforming, financially speaking”)
- Senior auditor for U.S. regulatory reporting
You get the idea: lots of senior manager to vice president jobs, and a lot of jobs about transformation.
Of course, the challenge with working at Citigroup is that you have to work at Citigroup, one of the largest banks in the world; that is not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea. The bank has been running about $2.3 trillion in total assets for the last year or so, and $17.3 billion in revenue. It also has roughly 210,000 employees worldwide.
So if you enjoy working in large corporate organizations laboring in highly regulated industries, Citi is a great place to be. (I’m serious; the audit and compliance challenges at Citi must be fascinating.) But if you’re hesitant about such environs, think long and hard about what you’re doing.
Why a Hiring Spree Now?
Citigroup didn’t disclose in its press release why it is hiring so many internal auditors right now — but I suspect this relates to the bank’s massive settlement with regulators last year over long-running risk management and compliance failures at Citi. The bank agreed to pay a $400 million penalty to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and to implement a raft of changes to its compliance, internal audit, and risk management functions. (Radical Compliance did an in-depth series on the settlement if you’d like to know the full details.)
One clause in the settlement directed Citi to conduct a staffing assessment of the bank’s risk management and internal audit functions “to ensure the allocation of adequate resources.”
Fourteen months later, here we are with Citi announcing plans to hire another 100 internal auditors. That staffing assessment must have been quite revealing.
Anyway, best of luck to anyone who applies. When you get a job there, let me know so I can include it in the weekly Compliance Jobs Report. Or if you know more about what’s going on at Citi and want to spill some tea, drop me a line at [email protected]. Confidentiality guaranteed.