Why do internal controls exist and what are they protecting against?

You follow the steps, but they feel like rules handed down for no clear reason. That is an uncomfortable way to work, and it is a fair thing to want to fix. Every control exists because something went wrong once, or could. You just have not been told the story behind each one yet. Understanding the why changes everything. A control is not busywork; it is a lesson someone learned the hard way, written into a step so it does not happen again. When you know the risk behind a control, you follow it better, and you can tell when it is not enough. Start with one control you do without thinking, and ask someone who would know: what would happen if we skipped this. The answer is the risk it guards against. Collect those answers a few at a time. Soon the whole system stops looking like arbitrary rules and starts looking like hard-won sense.