Audit planning

Building a Sustainable Analytics Function

Study after study has shown that data analytics is effective and efficient at detecting risk and identifying control weaknesses, non-compliance, and inefficient business processes. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Chief Audit Executives (CAEs) have repeatedly stated that data analysis expertise is a much-needed skill, and surveys by the ACFE and CPA firms over the past 10 to 15 years have rated data extraction, data analysis, and analytical software as critical…

September 8, 2021

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Analytics to support risk-based audit plan (RBAP)

The Risk-Base Audit Plan (RBAP) is an important output of Internal Audit. Not only is it a requirement of the IIA standards, but it also focuses audit on the most significant risks affecting the organization. In addition, it gives the Chief Audit Executives (CAEs) everything they needed to determine which audits will be performed and when; and to identify the required audit resources. However, developing a robust RBAP is not…

January 3, 2020

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Got Analytics – Now What?

What could be worse than not having an analytics capability? Having an analytics capability, but not being sure what to do with it! This means that you have invested in developing analytics to access your business systems, but now are unsure about: Which analytics do I run? How often should I run them? What do the results mean? How do I verify the results? How do I deal with false…

April 7, 2018

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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 12 – 1999 – Part 1 – Data analytics to assess risk

Wow – never realized how much work this would be. I mean, I am only posting once a week – but it still takes a lot of time. Not getting many comment, but I hope people are enjoying and learning from the posts. I had hoped more people would share their experiences so we could learn from each other. I was now interested in expanding my use of data analytics…

May 16, 2016

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Year 9 – 1996 – Promoting CAATTs

I had been writing articles for the Internal Auditor (IIA) and other audit-related magazines for several years now, but I wanted to do more to educate and encourage auditors in the use of analytics. One day I realized that if I assembled all of my previously published IIA articles, I had about 50% of the content necessary for a book on analytics. So I started developing an outline and writing…

April 25, 2016

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