Note: Sections of this course are available as self-paced e-learning. Click HERE for more information.
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What’s in it for you?
Learn how to audit smarter using data analytics. There’s no need to buy specialised software, we teach you how to do it in Microsoft Excel! Understand how to apply analytical procedures which are 80 times less costly per dollar of audit effort than tests of details. We teach you how to reduce your audit costs and produce results which are more objective, robust and statistically defendable. Use regression analysis to write audit conclusions saying “I am 95% confident that controls are operating effectively…”. Not to be confused with data mining, this course teaches data modelling and business intelligence, including how to construct dashboards for management monitoring and the foundations for automation and continuous auditing. Regression also help you to find fraud, court room tested and accepted.
Earn up to 14 CPE hours
Why is this relevant?
Audit practice and research has validated that advanced analytical procedures are incredibly more efficient & effective than tests of controls and tests of details. Yet, most auditors still trudge along doing substantive testing!
Auditors realise that testing for fraud is very difficult (no audit trail and possible collusion). Regression analysis is the # 1 objective fraud finding technique … court room tested and accepted. It also allows a statistical confidence to be assigned to the analysis. When was the last time your audit report started with the sentence “I am 95% confident that…”? This is powerful stuff. Think like an engineer: process, process, process: if it isn’t broken … perhaps don’t audit it.
Analytics work best when compared to operational data, and thus are highly applicable to:
- Fraud Audits
- Operational/Efficiency Audits
- Program/Policy/Agency/Performance Audits
- Compliance/Statutory Audits
- Financial Audits
- Process Improvement: Directing you towards worst practice and best practice (go there, and save your company big $ money)
What will you learn?
- Assess the staggering cost of audit evidence
- Cite and discuss the current literature supporting analytics for audit evidence
- How to perform basic and intermediate analytics (ratio, trend, metrics, flux analysis, mini-max tests)
- How to perform basic regression analysis in excel
- How to chart regression and statistical confidence bounds
- How to perform advanced regression analysis
- Applications of regression – finding fraud, missing data, as a test of controls, benchmarking, constructing dashboards
Who is training suitable for?
- All auditors (financial, compliance, operational, performance, efficiency, fraud, process, etc)
- Anyone who has asked “isn’t there a better way?”