Sawyer, Laurence B.

1911-2002 A U.S. internal auditing practitioner, educator, and author. Laurence (Larry) B. Sawyer is often referred to as the "grandfather" of modern internal auditing. This respectful title was coined from his Grandfather Dialogues, a series of articles in *Internal Auditor magazine in the early 1970s that were gathered in a book collection titled Modern Internal Auditing - What’s It All About? (Sawyer, 1974). Sawyer was a prolific author, and his output included the seminal internal auditing book The Practice of Modern Internal Auditing (1973): An indication of the book’s success and status among internal auditors is the renaming of subsequent editions with the eponymous title * Sawyer’s Internal Auditing. With *Gerald Vinten, he also coauthored The Manager and the Internal Auditor: Partners for Profit (1996). Sawyer sought to shift the emphasis of internal auditing from that of a purely compliance function to one of constructive engagement with an organization’s management. He insisted that "internal auditors must be equipped and prepared to review and appraise anything under the sun" (quoted in Flesher, 1991, 175). This shift of auditing emphasis involved, as he put it, a move "from the commonplace aspect of mathematical verification to the managerial concept of organization-wide evaluations" (Sawyer, 1998), and it marked the end of "the internal auditor of the classic stereotype, the cold, secretive, finger-pointer" (Sawyer and Vinten, 1996, 339). Sawyer made significant contributions to the development and reform of internal auditing, and the *Institute of Internal Auditors honored him with many awards during his lifetime. Further reading: Sawyer (1973); Sawyer (1974); Sawyer (1983); Sawyer (1998); Sawyer and Vinten (1996); Sawyer et al. (2003)