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Weekly UpdatestHE BIRD PERCHED HIGH ON A TREE LIMB SURVEYS the surrounding landscape. Below the bird are all the resources she needs to live--food, raw materials to build a nest--although the most crucial items are often well-hidden. Every day the bird's sole task is to seek and find, take just what she needs to get by, and make something out of it.
Like the bird, internal auditors are seekers. They spend their days searching for the most relevant information about their organization's operations from an ever-growing and increasingly tangled data sphere and trying to make sense of it. Somewhere hidden in their organization's computers, networks, databases, and spreadsheets are signs of fraud, control weaknesses, and unforeseen risks, as well as opportunities for improvement. And the more data the organization has, the harder it is to find.
Internal auditors have their own technologies to do the job, though. More than three-fourths of large corporations' internal audit departments are using data analysis software to make audits more efficient and sort through much-greater amounts of information, according to The IIA's 2009 IT Audit Benchmarking Study. These tools have helped audit shops reduce the number of audits, focus fieldwork on red flags identified by the software, and even implement continuous auditing.
The articles on the following pages discuss how auditors are using technology. "Software Trend Spotting" by Neil Baker (page 30) reports the results of the 2009 IT study, including both the benefits auditors have derived and the stumbling blocks they have encountered in using these tools. In "Leveraging Data Analysis Software" (page 35), Norman Marks says chief audit executives need to make better use of the capabilities of today's audit tools to meet the increased demand to do more with less. And in "Accounting for Words," by Daniel Torpey and Vincent Walden (page 40), we learn how a unique use of audit software--text analysis--can reveal hidden risks.
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Each feature describes ways in which software tools can enhance audit capabilities and help pinpoint actionable data. But the technology is only as good as the individuals operating it. Ultimately, auditors must take flight and leverage these tools in ways that best serve the organization.
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