Audit Data Analytics
Audit Data Analytics involves the analysis of a complete set of data to identify anomalies & trends for further investigation as well as to provide audit evidence.
This process usually involves an analysis of entire populations of data, rather than examining a small sample of the data.
An auditor can benefit in the following ways:
1. Better advance planning, since analytics can be used early in an audit to identify problem areas.
2. Better risk assessments, based on any anomalies and trends uncovered.
3. Higher-quality audit evidence, since the auditor can now examine far more data than had previously been possible with audit sampling.
4. The communication of more issues to the client, since data analytics is more likely to uncover a variety of anomalies that could be of interest to those charged with governance of the client.