Risk and Compliance Officer-Readvertised

Our package

We offer flexible working, a competitive benefits package:

Department: Business Partner Services

Grade: Grade D (£36,000 per annum), adjusted for local cost of living according to location

Location: Global, with travel. Applicants must be resident and possess the legal right to live and work in the country where they are based.

Fixed term contract: Full-time; one year with possibility of extension, depending on availability of funding and performance.

Responsible To: Internal Audit Manager

This role will be required to travel to Ukraine as soon as possible and therefore we are looking for someone who has the existing right to travel to Europe/Ukraine. This includes passport holders who can enter Poland and Ukraine without a visa or someone who has visas to enter the countries.**

HelpAge and Strategy 2030 – delivering real impact for older people

HelpAge International works with partners and a diverse global network of more than 150 organisations across 85 countries, supporting millions of older people to live safe, dignified and healthy lives. Through our partnership and collaborations, we work to ensure the inclusion of older people across society and strive to deliver a just and fair world for everyone, whatever their age. Our work is driven by our desire to deliver real impact for older people, to be inclusive, to work in partnership and to learn from our shared experience.

Our 2030 strategy Ageing in a Just World sets out how we will work together to shape the future we all share. By working together, we aim to help inspire a movement for change and through ensuring all our work promotes older people’s wellbeing, dignity and voice, we can transform the lives of older people now and in the future.

Since the launch of our strategy in January 2020, the world has changed in profound ways. We are still experiencing the impacts and consequences. Recognising and anticipating these important and fundamental shifts, HelpAge International is evolving and transforming itself to be relevant, impactful and viable. As a result, we are reconfiguring our organisational design and resources in the following ways:

• Driven by our commitment to the localisation agenda, we are evolving the way we partner and deliver value at the country and local level. In the coming 3 years, we will localise our country offices and programmes, and develop new and diverse forms of partnerships globally.
• We seek to give primacy to local agents for change. To this end, we will replace all programmes delivered by HelpAge staff and resources on the ground with implementation by partners. This will apply across all our work – humanitarian and long-term development. Going forward, our value is framed around supporting, convening and thought leadership.
• A key way of creating value and bringing impact is collaborating across boundaries and by bringing different perspectives, skills and talent together. We will deliver our work through agile teams and a global operating model, with regional roots, to focus on impact and maintain the relationships at the national level to help build collaborations and support others to set their own agendas.

How you can make a difference

At HelpAge International, we offer a unique and exceptional career experience to bring positive and lasting change in the lives of older persons. As countries prepare for and adapt to population ageing, you can make a difference at a critical juncture to how societies, economies and institutions adapt to this change. Guided by our commitment to our values of impact, learning, partnership, and inclusion (see values), you will work with talent like yourself and partner with other agents for change to bring systemic change and impact at scale. By acting as a supporter, convener and thought leader, together, we can make an impact that matters for older persons and their communities. HelpAge International offers you an inclusive, collaborative workplace and innovative environment.

This is a critical time for HelpAge International as we seek to transform the ways the organisation works and brings value. We are looking for exceptional individuals who will explore new opportunities to create value, to find new avenues, unique ways and novel partnership and collaborations to reach our shared goals. We are looking for talent which thrives in collaborating with others (inside HelpAge International and beyond) and who can work in agile ways and across boundaries. We are seeking individuals, with an entrepreneurial mindset, who can work across diverse areas of our work, who can leverage both their unique expertise and deploy a wider range of experiences and competencies.

What you will do

Key areas for impact/influence and responsibilities

These outline the broad areas of responsibility in the role, but in collaboration with your colleagues, you will be able to shape and design specific activities that are relevant at any point in time. We want you to work creatively to deliver impact and respond to relevant opportunities.

With your colleagues, you will develop your teamwork plan to drive initiatives, develop ideas, as well ensure there is space for cross-organisational working and short-term tasks. From this, you will devise your individual work plan that will form the basis of your day to day activities and your performance reviews.

Department info

The role of the Business Partner Services Department is to –

• Establish and provide an efficient (internal) client-focused service that allows HelpAge’s teams and partners to deliver on the 2030 strategy.
• Provide professional business support services to portfolios, projects, and teams across the organisation.

The Department includes finance, human resources, operations and internal audit functions.

Team info

HelpAge places great importance on a responsible approach to risk management and reporting to the Board on risk assessment and mitigation. The successful applicant will ensure that the organisation is successfully meeting all compliance requirements, both donor as well as local legal requirements.

The successful applicant will also support the Internal Audit Manager to identify those areas of potentially higher risk within the organisation, and work to develop a framework to assess them more fully.

HelpAge is committed to ensuring the highest standards of financial, HR, operational and programme management. The successful applicant has a key role to play in ensuring that this commitment is met through the delivery of an agreed programme of risk compliance work. This work will focus on ensuring that financial and other control procedures identified in the risk register are being properly implemented, managed and used in all overseas offices, in emergency programmes and by our operational partners.

The successful applicant will work on a range of programmes and areas in HelpAge, but there will be a specific focus on our Ukraine response programme which is currently being implemented in Ukraine, Moldova and Poland. The role is likely to require some travel to this region.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Will carry out risk and compliance reviews of programmes and Country Offices, based on the Internal Audit Plan approved by the Finance & Audit Committee.
• Support Internal Audit Manager on identifying areas of risk across the organisation’s operations, and developing plans to address them.
• Develop and maintain the Risk and Compliance Procedures to ensure that best practice is taken account of and that the audits address specific areas of risk management
• Undertake the approved compliance review in line with agreed procedures liaising with the relevant HelpAge or Partner staff.
• At the conclusion of risk and compliance exercises to provide a full briefing to the relevant Country Director or partner organisation ensuring that their comments are recorded as part of the review.
• Agree action plan necessary to implement the audit recommendations with the Country Director or the director of relevant department.
• Present the audit report to the Internal Audit Manager, highlighting any areas of concern and the resultant action plan.
• Monitor and support offices with the implementation of any recommendations.
• Identify common features across audits and organisation-wide issues, proposing appropriate systems improvements.

Other roles

• Provide advice to HelpAge finance staff on internal control procedures and support the organisation with strengthening internal control procedures
• Ensure that issues of internal control are considered during all work and in the development of new policies and procedures
• Contribute to continuous review of the organisations systems and to recommend changes as necessary
• Perform any other tasks as requested by the Internal Audit Manager.

Let’s talk about you

You will be someone with:

You will be someone with the following experience, professional qualifications, skills and attributes:

• Membership of one of the accounting, legal or compliance bodies or similar
• Experience of Risk and / or Compliance work
• Ability to design risk-based reviews
• Experience of risk appraisal and management techniques
• Experience international organisations with overseas offices
• Experience in ensuring compliance with donor requirements
• Experience in ensuring compliance with statutory requirements in other countries
• Experience in the finance function of a not-for-profit or charitable organisation.
• Experience of writing financial procedures
• Legal experience
• Excellent communication and reporting skills (verbal and in writing)
• Planning & analytical skills
• Negotiating and influencing skills
• Proactive, co-operative and supportive team player
• Ability to work to deadlines
• Experience of working across cultures
• Ability and willingness for overseas travel, including to conflict affected areas
• Good mastery of the English language.
• Ability and willingness to travel overseas, including at short notice.

At HelpAge International, we believe in the importance of empowering our people to be change-makers and leaders at all levels. We expect our people to embrace and live our values, challenging themselves every day to identify issues that are most important to older persons and their communities, and to make an impact that matters.

In addition, as an HelpAge employee you are expected to:

• Work collaboratively, building mutual trust and respect, with external organisations and partners to achieve our strategic aims and objectives; being accountable for the work you do together
• Adapt to new directions or opportunities arising within the organisation and in your work area; being flexible in your role, constantly using the feedback to learn more and evolve further.
• Lead behavioural and cultural change through embracing a supportive, collaborative and highly inclusive environment where everybody feels supported, respected and engaged
• Extend HelpAge’s reach and impact by creating and identifying new business development opportunities and building relationships with new partners.
• Lead and promote a culture of including the voices of older people across our support, convening and thought leadership roles, in a way that is transformative, empowering and highly inclusive of those marginalised by gender, economic status, disability and other factors of discrimination.

Safeguarding

HelpAge International is committed to safeguarding the communities with which we work, our partners, staff and any others who we come into contact with.

Therefore, you will also be responsible for:

• Preventing harm and abuse from our people, operations and programmes to anyone that encounters our work.
• Reporting all safeguarding incidents you see, hear, hear about or suspect, using our internal reporting mechanism.
• Complying with all safeguarding framework policies and practices
• Completing mandatory training courses relating to our safeguarding policy framework and complying with HR vetting procedures.