After my year of consulting in numerous private sector companies I felt that my experience not only with ACL, but also with risk assessment and fraud risk assessment in particular had grown. While ACL’s basic command set was powerful, there were a number of techniques that I had used specifically for fraud that were not (at this time) included in the basic ACL command set. They required the use of…
This was another exciting year for me. First, in 1999, I had decided to take a year off without pay and do some sub-contracting for ACL (I forgot to mention this in 1999 post). It gave me the opportunity to really expand my analysis skills. Also, I worked on the development of DirectLink for SAP which really forced me to develop a better understanding of SAP – something that has…
Technically, we were still in the planning phase of the A/P audit – but had already identified several areas of risk that needed to be analyzed further. The early payments represented a potential fraud. If you paid within 15 days, you should receive an early payment discount of between 1.5 -2.5% depending on the vendor’s terms. In addition to reviewing the invoices with ‘immediate’ payment terms, we calculated the difference…
Our analytics team was running on all cylinders and achieving significant results. There was not just my opinion, we received an ISACA Award of Excellence at the Info Tech Audit ’95 conference for leadership and contribution to IT Audit Community. Amazingly, it was a $1,000 cash award. The team (3 people) went for out for a celebratory dinner and donated the remaining funds to a local charity. By how we…
Having been a member of the IIA since 1990, I always looked forward to the Internal Auditor magazine. However, it rarely included articles on computer-assisted audit tools and techniques (CAATTs). I wrote the first of several articles on data analytics “Computer-Assisted Audit Tools and Techniques: The Power of CAATT is turning up the ‘can-do’ potential of some audit shops”. It was published in February 1993 and, to my knowledge, was…
Welcome to the 1990’s, the age of personal computers, distributed processing and the promise of great things from technology – sound familiar? About six months ago, my manager questioned me about the fact that I had provided reports to, and performed analysis for, other audit teams. He said, “You were hired as an IT auditor, not to support other audit teams.” At the same time, he recognized that the audits…
In 1989 I was assigned a second audit in the telecom area. The main objective was to assess our use of Leased Long Distance Lines (LLDLs). LLDLs were dedicated long distance lines that were primarily used for transfer of data. Rather than pay long distance charges, we had dedicated lines for this purpose. The LLDLs were cheaper than using regular lines, and had higher quality and faster speeds. I asked…
Year 1 – 1988 My first audit position was in an organization employed over 100 auditors divided into business lines: finance, HR, operations, and IT. I was hired as a Senior IT auditor even though I had no internal audit experience and only (what I felt was) limited IT experience. On top of that, I was getting very little (read “no”) support from my supervisor. To be fair, there were…