Internal Auditors

dhuffman63

Forums

How many people here are internal auditors?  I'd love some ideas on ways to use IDEA in all sorts of areas.  I work for a tribal govt in Internal Audit and am also a CFE.  I use IDEA in a variety of ways usually for special projects like the new Covid 19 payroll, and determining turnover but would love to develop some weekly/monthly recurring analysis using the data I can get from our accounting system and the HR system.  Eventually I'd like to get access to the gaming data.    How many have the IDEA certifications?  I've been looking at jobs and a lot of audit + analytics specify ACL.

Brian Element Fri, 06/05/2020 - 10:24

Hi there,

Well I am no longer an internal auditor but I did work in Internal Audit for about 7+ years at one of the larger Canadian Departments, so I have had some experience using IDEA on the program side.  Many times it really depends on what the data is.  

If you are looking for tests you might want to check out this white paper from IDEA as it might have sometihng intereting for you - https://idea.caseware.com/the-complete-guide-to-auditing-with-data-analytics-tools

I have both certification with IDEA, I kind of needed them as before joining CaseWare I was a trainer for them for about 20 years.  I lot of the skills you learn with IDEA are transferable to ACL as they do more or less the same thing, just maybe in different ways.

laura.garner Sun, 06/21/2020 - 21:30

I am an auditor for a large state government department in Australia. We have been using IDEA to run a continuous controls monitoring program, in addition to analytic support for operational reviews. The CCM program is entirely scripted through IDEAScript and covers key controls in Finance, HR and procurement.
ACL is very similar so you would have transferrable skills if you needed to use it, but in my opinion the scripting language of IDEA is much easier to use and understand.

dhuffman63 Mon, 06/22/2020 - 10:36

Laura I'd really love to hear about what you are doing.  As of right now I'm not planning on leaving where I am as I'm given a lot of latitude in what I do on a daily basis and that freedom is precious.  I took the Intro to Programming for Data Analysis and yes IDEAScript made a lot of sense.  I'm wanting to take the other two classes also.

laura.garner Tue, 06/23/2020 - 18:04

Yes that freedom is precious! When we started our controls monitoring program we began with an audit in that area - it provided a good understanding of the process and which controls were best to target, we got a good understanding of the data available, and it established relationships with the business area that would be responsible for monitoring the exceptions - this was critical as it was a new concept and we had to bring the business on the journey with us. From there it was just a matter of getting the data on a regular basis (don't underestimate how long this can take!!!) and writing the script for ongoing analysis (this was the easy part). We got to the point where we couldn't manage the program on Excel spreadsheets and manual monitoring, so we implemented CaseWare Monitor to manage the exceptions that come out of the IDEA analysis. 

dhuffman63 Wed, 06/24/2020 - 09:34

I work for a small Tribal govt and so far have been fortunate in that I can get the data rather easily through ODBC into our SQL databases.  I doubt we'll get the Caseware Monitor program anytime soon as the cost benefit currently just isn't there.  We have different types of businesses, convenience stores, govt contracts, casinos, so I've kind of had to learn a million things.  I have several recurring "projects" that I set up by recording a macro then saving as IDEAScript and creating an icon that I just push when I want to run so I cut down the manual work considerably.  There are so many things I'd like to do but the company isn't there yet. :)