Year 23 – 2010 – HR Data

Following on the success achieved by the development of the standard extract of financial data from SAP, I decided to design and develop a standard extract from PeopleSoft – our company used SAP for finances and PeopleSoft for HR and another package for Pay (don’t ask why).  For HR data, we really only needed three files to address most of the audit requirements: Person – providing information on the employee…

October 3, 2016
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Year 22 – 2009 – SAP Extract

Imagine my excitement when I had 7 responses to my previous post on Payroll and then my utter disappointment when I found out that all we in Russian and had nothing to do with the content of my blog.  This continued for several days and suddenly switched to English posts about Credit Unions.  In total I had over 65 spam bot posts including two that wanted to help me monetarize…

September 12, 2016
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Year 21 – 2008 – part 2 – Payroll and Vacation

No having to rely on samples allowed us to perform audits more efficiently and effectively.  The audit results were more easily defendable (no arguments about the representativeness of the sample and the validity of the extrapolation).  It also supported better coverage and more comprehensive audits. Vacation audit – the company allowed employees to carry forward vacation days – but different unions had negotiated different amounts.  Depending on the union to…

September 5, 2016
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Year 21 – 2008 – part 1 – Ensuring Integrity

 Accessing different systems, trying to address auditor requirements, and performing complex analysis – they all present risks.  And while I have had a great deal of success, there also have been many mistakes.  I once heard it said, “learn from others mistakes – you don’t have enough time to make them all yourself” or something similar.  This is why I always try to post a lesson-learned and this post is…

August 29, 2016
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Year 20 – 2007 – Inventory

It was hard to believe, but I had now been at this (data analytics to support audit) for 20 years.  And I still found it interesting, challenging, frustrating, rewarding and aggravating – all at once. I was constantly being asked to access new systems and perform analysis for different types of audits.  At the same time, I had my regular monthly routine tasks of extracting, downloading and cleansing data we…

August 22, 2016
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Year 19 – 2006 – Health Claims

Note: I hope this is like the ACL forum where there are more people reading it, but not posting questions/answers.  While I am enjoying my trip down memory lane – it is a lot of work and it would be a shame if I was the only one reading the posts.  My aim was to encourage discussion and sharing – this is not happening and lessens the value of the…

August 15, 2016
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Year 18 – 2005 – Quantitative Indicators of Risk – part 2

This is Part2 of an article on developing quantitative indicators of risk to support the annual risk-based audit planning process. Part1 presented the concept that risk (Probability and Impact) can be measured quantitatively by looking at Complexity and Change (which increase the probability) and Materiality or Volume (which increases the impact).  It also encouraged you to look at more than financial risk.  Part 2 presents examples of indicators of risk…

August 8, 2016
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Year 18 – 2005 – Quantitative Indicators of Risk – part 1

This was my first attempt at identifying risk to support the development of the annual risk-based audit plan (RBAP).  I have been involved in the development of the RBAP – even responsible for it – over the years and always felt that it was more professional opinion than anything else.  Some people built a spreadsheet with weighting factors 1-5 and fooled themselves into believing that there is a logic and…

August 2, 2016
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Year 17 – 2004 – Part 2 – Construction

From time to time I was lucky enough to get to do some consulting work.  These were usually fairly large audits, involving a number of external experts.  As the “data guy” I was often given very little time to perform the required analysis.  On such audit was a review of the costs for a major construction project.  The audit team did not have all of the necessary expertise and had…

July 27, 2016
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Year 17 – 2004 – Part 1 – Direct Deposit

This was the year that I re-published my second book “Fraud Detection: A Revealing Look at Fraud (2004).  This dealt with obtaining, verifying and analyzing the data to support fraud prevention, detection and investigation.  However, it was also relevant to regular internal audit analyses. I thought I would do something a little different this week – so here is a fraud analysis story.  It is based on an actual fraud…

July 18, 2016
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