Planning

- As previously mentioned, performing an audit is more than examining financial records to uncover fraud. A lot of work auditors do also involves testing internal controls and operational processes to identify risks and opportunities for improvement. This requires collaboration with almost each department within the organization and the ability to stay up-to-date with industry trends, as well as changes in regulations. This means continuous learning is a critical part of the job, and honestly, my favorite part. You definitely won't get bored with all the new things there are to learn. While you're out there learning all the new and shiny things, it's also important you stick to a schedule. You need a method to the madness. While every audit is new and exciting, there are certain steps or phases that every auditor must follow when completing each audit. For this course, we'll focus on three main phases: planning, fieldwork, and reporting. Remember, this course isn't meant to be an all-inclusive tutorial to learn how to audit. We're going to be focusing primarily on the potential ways that you can incorporate a data-driven approach for these phases. First, let's start with the planning phase. Have you ever tried to go on a road trip without planning in advance? Sure, you can throw a bunch of stuff in your car and hope for the best, but you'll probably end up at the beach with snow boots or on a mountain with sandals. All important projects should be planned out first for them to be successful. In the audit world, planning is the phase where you obtain background information, like understanding the procedures, processes, and how the controls should work for the department you're going to audit. During this phase, you should also start to gather the data you will need. This may seem a bit early, but in my experience, it's really important to get access to the data as soon as you can so you can start evaluating things like data quality. I remember one project where we had everything all planned out, but once we started, it went sideways. We identified what data we needed, but once we tried to get access to that data, we found out it wasn't being captured correctly. Basically, we had bad data. And because of that, we had to go back to the drawing board and change our entire testing approach. Looking back, it's kind of like we only half planned the audit. We knew we were going to the beach, and we knew we needed sandals, but we didn't have sandals in our closet, and when we went to the store, they were all sold out. So start the data gathering as soon as possible in the planning phase. You'll be glad you did. During this time, you should also be thinking about the potential risks that could happen and any particular area within the organization you would need to look at extra carefully. This could come from reviewing past audit findings or industry benchmarks. This could also come from talking with management and asking if there are any processes they would like help with improving or verifying they're working appropriately. I always found audits that came from these self-assessments were the most valuable to the organization. Now, on to what I think is the main event: fieldwork.