Barbi Goldstein

Barbi Goldstein, a founding member of Protiviti, is an accomplished leader, innovator, and subject matter expert.

Barbi started her career in internal audit, helping large global institutions take a risk-based approach to providing assurance across their organizations. In addition to collaborating with clients throughout the audit lifecycle, Barbi found her niche assisting large financial institutions with regulatory issue closure. She helped several internal audit departments create or re-engineer their approaches, templates, training, and other elements of their issue validation processes to consistently meet regulatory expectations. She then leveraged this expertise to help first-line business units properly assess and document their own issue closures, satisfying the scrutiny of internal audit and regulators.

Barbi took a hiatus from risk- and controls-focused client work when she became Protiviti's Global Innovation Leader in 2019. In this capacity, Barbi was responsible for advancing Protiviti's firmwide innovation posture. Her role included overseeing the organization's innovation sites, projects, and resources globally. Barbi was instrumental in enabling an innovative mindset across the firm.

In 2023, Barbi was asked to lead Protiviti's strategic account program, a role she still holds today. In this capacity, Barbi focuses on instituting programs that help Protiviti foster a culture of delivering exceptional client experiences. Clients have always been Barbi's strongest passion, and today she leverages her innovative mindset to rethink what an optimized experience feels like for Protiviti's clients, seeking ways to enable all of Protiviti's leaders to deliver a differentiated experience.

Major Projects

• Leading issue validation efforts, including design of overall validation framework, creation of supporting tools and templates, performance and review of regulatory issue validations, and working directly with the regulators to socialize validation strategy as well as further understand their expectations.
• Managing the internal audit relationships at numerous Protiviti clients. Responsibilities include overseeing loan staff relationships as well as assisting with co-source activities such as risk assessment execution, development of multi-year audit plans, execution of the associated audits, and drafting and issuing of internal audit reports.
• Executing EQA and leading practices reviews. Scope of these engagements has included qualitative and quantitative benchmarking assessment of all areas of internal audit against other organizations of similar size and complexity. Scope has also included gap assessment of the Internal Audit function against regulatory standards, such as FRB SR 13-1 and OCC Handbook and Heightened Standards.
• Consulting with internal audit innovation leads and internal audit analytics leads to discuss industry leading practice and the future of internal audit related to data, analytics, automation, and innovation.
• Assisting numerous organizations in the establishment and ongoing support of their individual SOX 404 initiatives. Responsibilities have included leading teams in scoping the relevant business and technology processes as well as project management of all phases required for compliance, including documentation, remediation, and testing.

Areas of Expertise

• Internal Audit
• Issue Validation
• Internal Audit Leading Practices
• Internal Audit Analytics

Industry Expertise

• Asset Management
• Banking
• Insurance
• Leasing

Education

• BS Business Administration and Economics, University at Albany

Professional Memberships and Certifications

• Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA)
• Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC)
• Project Management Professional (PMP)