2013-04-01
By Peter Millar
According to a new survey conducted by Deloitte UK, 47% of respondents said that the increased use of data analytics would most help IA providing assurance over the risk of fraud. Who am I to argue about that! You can find the survey report here. It’s a good read.
This is a very interesting study that talks about how Internal Audit can assist in safeguarding their organizations from the risk of fraud through prevention, protection and detection. To give you a short introduction, here is a small excerpt from the Key Findings section on Page 2:
“One of the key findings to emerge from Deloitte’s second biannual Internal Audit survey is the disparate Approach to the use of data analytics in the prevention, detection and investigation of fraud. When asked whether data analysis is used by Internal Audit in their fraud prevention, detection or investigation activities, 40% of our respondents said ‘no’. 38% also said they were not adequately resourced to perform data analysis. When asked what would help Internal Audit be more effective in providing assurance over fraud risk, 47% said an increased use of data analytics would help the most. This is echoed by 28% who indicated that they planned to implement data mining tools in the next 12 months.”
An additional capability associated with spreadsheets is the macro. So many neat things can be done with macros. But who writes them? Who documents what they do? Who tests them to make sure they haven’t introduced errors into the calculations? Here is a bit more guidance on that: The IIA GTAG on user-developed applications provides some leading practices in this area.
If you are using ACL in your audit shop, check out ACL’s own fraud page and help provide heightened assurance over the risk of fraud.
I also highly recommend the IIA’s GTAG #13 on Fraud Detection and Prevention.
Find out more: ACL Blog
