--- name: audit-risk-communication-translator description: "Rewrites audit findings and risk concepts for a specific target audience — Board, regulators, executives, engineering, or product teams — stripping jargon, reframing severity in the audience's own decision terms, and converting findings into actionable next steps. Produces an audience-calibrated version of a finding with a headline, translated body, and clear ask. Use when an audit finding needs to land differently for the Board, a regulator, or a technical team, or when a risk concept isn't resonating across business and technical audiences." argument-hint: "[finding] [target-audience]" allowed-tools: ["Read"] --- # Audit Risk Communication Translator ## Purpose Take a raw audit finding or risk concept and rewrite it for one specific audience so it lands correctly — Board members hear governance and exposure, engineers hear the technical control gap, product teams hear the delivery tradeoff — without diluting severity or leaving the reader unsure what to do next. Solves the recurring problem where a technically accurate finding gets ignored, misjudged, or over-panicked because it was written for the wrong reader. ## When to Use Invoke this skill when the user asks to: - Rewrite an audit finding for the Board, an Audit Committee, or the CEO - Translate a technical control gap into language engineers or product teams will act on - Prepare a finding for a regulator or external examiner - Turn a jargon-heavy risk write-up into plain, actionable language - Reframe severity so a business audience understands the exposure without overstating it - Produce multiple audience versions of the same finding for a mixed-stakeholder briefing ## Inputs Required Before starting, collect: - **The finding**: The audit finding or risk concept as currently written (raw notes are fine) - **Target audience**: Board / Audit Committee / Regulator / Executive / Engineering / Product / Operations - **Severity or rating**: The finding's current rating (e.g., High/Medium/Low, or a control effectiveness rating) - **Business impact**: What could go wrong in real terms — financial, regulatory, operational, reputational - **Root cause**: Why the gap exists (process, control design, ownership, tooling) - **Desired outcome**: What you want this audience to do — approve remediation funding, assign an owner, acknowledge risk acceptance, remediate by a date - **Sensitivity**: Any framing constraints (regulator-facing wording, legal review pending, politically sensitive owner) If severity or root cause is missing, translate what's provided and flag the gap rather than inventing detail. ## Instructions ### Step 1: Identify the Audience's Decision Frame Before rewriting, lock what this audience actually cares about and decides on: - **Board / Audit Committee**: Governance, aggregate exposure, whether management has it under control, and whether they need to intervene. They think in risk appetite, oversight duty, and reputational/regulatory consequence — not controls mechanics. - **Regulator / Examiner**: Whether the institution identified the issue, understands it, and has a credible, dated remediation plan. Precision, evidence, and no defensiveness. Avoid minimizing language. - **Executive (CEO/CFO/COO)**: Business consequence, cost of fixing vs. cost of not fixing, and the tradeoff decision in front of them. They want the "so what" and the ask in the first two sentences. - **Engineering**: The specific control or system gap, the technical mechanism of failure, and what change closes it. They tolerate detail but reject vague risk-speak with no reproducible cause. - **Product**: The user/delivery impact and the tradeoff between shipping and exposure. Frame as a decision they own, not a compliance demand imposed on them. - **Operations**: The process breakdown, who does what differently going forward, and the operational cost of the change. ### Step 2: Strip and Translate the Jargon Run the finding through a translation pass: - Remove audit-internal vocabulary (control deficiency, inherent vs. residual risk, IPE, SOD, walkthrough) unless the audience is regulator or auditor - Replace ratings-speak with consequence: "High residual risk" → "If this isn't fixed, X can happen and no control would catch it" - Convert passive control language into concrete actor-and-action: "Access reviews were not performed" → "No one checked who had access to the payments system for 14 months" - Preserve the technical precision for engineering/regulator audiences; abstract it to consequence for Board/executive audiences ### Step 3: Reframe Severity in the Audience's Terms Restate why this matters using the audience's own risk language: - Board/Committee: aggregate exposure, appetite breach, oversight implication - Regulator: control breakdown, remediation status, containment - Executive: dollars, days, and downside scenario - Engineering/Product: what breaks, who's affected, blast radius Keep the severity honest — do not upgrade a Medium to sound urgent, or soften a High to avoid alarm. ### Step 4: Convert the Finding Into an Actionable Ask End with an unambiguous next step matched to what this audience can actually authorize or execute: - Board/Committee: acknowledge, approve remediation resourcing, or formally accept the risk - Regulator: here is the plan, owner, and remediation date - Executive: approve the fix / accept the tradeoff by a date - Engineering/Product: the specific change, the owner, the target date Make the ask a single sentence the reader could act on without a follow-up meeting. ### Step 5: Apply the Tone and Sensitivity Constraints - Regulator-facing: factual, dated, no hedging and no defensiveness; never minimize - Board-facing: calm, confident, oversight-oriented; never technical for its own sake - Internal technical: direct and collaborative, not accusatory of the team that owns the gap - Honor any legal/political constraints supplied in inputs ## Output Format - **Structure**: A single audience-calibrated version of the finding, delivered in four labeled parts - **Length**: 200–350 words for the translated finding - **Format**: Structured document with a bolded headline line, a translated body, a severity/exposure line, and a one-sentence ask - **Sections**: (1) Headline — one line stating the finding in this audience's terms; (2) What This Means — the translated body, jargon removed; (3) Why It Matters — severity reframed in the audience's risk terms; (4) The Ask — one actionable next step. Close with a short **Translator Notes** block flagging any assumptions, missing inputs, or wording to run past legal before use. - **Tone**: Matched to audience per Step 5 — never generic corporate; honest about severity, never inflating or minimizing ## Quality Checklist Before delivering output, verify: - [ ] The version is written for exactly one named audience — not a hybrid - [ ] All audit-internal jargon is removed (or retained only for regulator/auditor audiences) - [ ] Severity matches the original rating — not upgraded for urgency or softened for comfort - [ ] The ask is a single actionable sentence the audience can authorize or execute - [ ] Passive control language is converted to concrete actor-and-action statements - [ ] Translator Notes flags any missing input (severity, root cause) rather than inventing it ## Notes - To produce versions for multiple audiences from one finding, run the skill once per audience — a Board version and an engineering version should read like two different documents about the same problem. - The most common failure is a translated finding that's clear but has no ask — a finding without a next step gets acknowledged and forgotten. - For regulator-facing translations, err toward under-claiming remediation progress; a plan you overshoot on is worse than a conservative one you beat. - When a finding is politically sensitive, keep the root cause about the process or control design, not the individual — this preserves accuracy while keeping the message actionable. --- ## How to use this skill This file is a Claude Code skill in [Anthropic's standard format](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills) — markdown with YAML frontmatter at the top. **Installing in Claude Code:** - `~/.claude/skills//SKILL.md` — auto-loads in every session anywhere on your machine (recommended for skills you'll use across multiple projects) - `/.claude/skills//SKILL.md` — auto-loads only when working in that project (recommended for project-specific skills) Restart Claude Code or open a new session to register. **Using in Claude.ai, ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI tools:** 1. 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