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The paper aims to emphasize the transformations occurring in the internal audit field at globallevel, in these changing times, due to machine intelligence development. The artificial intelligencetechnology impact on businesses is huge, providing opportunities and challenges altogether. Theinternal audit is changing, the auditors need to understand the basics of artificial intelligence, toidentify their the roles they ought to play and the exposure they take, risks and opportunities of AI;they need to get ready for the change, reshape their role and adapt to process automation.

Starting on 25 May 2018, all Member States, including Romania, must apply the new GeneralData Protection Regulation 2016/679. It contains obligations regarding the collection, processing,storing, disclosing of data to individuals (clients, employees, etc.), with very large sanctions. Although, as a rule, record-keeping obligations do not apply to small and medium sizedenterprises, organizations with less than 250 employees have record-keeping obligations unless theprocessing is likely to generate certain risks for the rights and freedoms of the data subjects, if it’snot occasional or includes special data, and many SMEs enterprises fall into such situations. In this light, the present paper analyzes the impact of the new regulation and the stage ofimplementation of the necessary measures for compliance at the level of the Romanian small andmedium sized enterprises.

Economic growth and the level of employment are two key factors that economists should consider when analyzing different economic aspects. In this article, we focus on the relation between the growth of unemployment rate and the growth of real gross domestic product (both expressed as a percentage) in the case of Romania. In our research we answer at the following questions? Is Okun’s rule valid in Romanian economy from 2000 to 2018? Does it hold over time? What is the relation between these variables? The empirical analysis showed the inverse relationship between them, confirming Okun’s findings, underlying that the rule is valid in the Romanian economy in the analyzed period, although the small value of R-squared made us interpret the results with caution, questioning somehow the sustainability of the law over time. Its validity can be seen more on short term analysis rather than on long term projections.

In a changing world, with a massive exposure to risks on all levels, from nature climate change to violent cyber war attempts, the business environment needs to adapt its instruments in mitigating and responding to cyber-security risks on different stages: prevention, detection, disposal, improvement. Internal audit function has a key role in assessing cyber disruptions as part of strategic risks and identifying the operational control gaps on the business level, working with management at developing and maintaining an adaptive capacity to different types of risks building and improving business continuity.

Cyber terrorism is an intangible danger, a real over the corner threat in the life of individuals,organizations, and governments and is getting harder to deal with its damages. The motivations forthe cyber-attacks are different, depending on the terrorist group, from cybercrime to hacktivism,attacks over the authorities’ servers. Organizations constantly need to find new ways ofstrengthening protection against cyber-attacks, assess their cyber readiness, expand the resiliencecapacity and adopts international security regulations.

Cryptocurrencies appeared as a normal evolution of digital money. It is certain that cash is less used compared to twenty years ago, most transactions are made online or using digital money, such as banking transfers, credit cards payments, mobile applications, pay pal, etc. Cryptocurrency became the second generation of digital money, in a improved form, using current technology, and is constantly growing, exceeding the most optimistic predictions, but is also challenging and unpredictable because of it is impossible to control it anyhow.