I recently received
the following question from an AuditNet user. I thought the group might have
appropriate responses.
I am looking for guidelines or procedures
for electronic data
/ files that are used for an audit, but not specifically documented in
hard copy for the workpapers. For example, let's say you extract from
a financial database contract payments into a database or spreadsheet
and it is fairly large. Then you take a sample from this to use for
audit tests. Not a question about documentation of how you do the sampling
and the testing & results. However, how do you provide documentation on
the audit universe data used for this testing when you may not want to
or need to print out a hard copy of a lot of data, maybe several
hundred pages? Obviously you can save an electronic copy of large files like
this on your hard disk, server's hard disks, CDs, etc. However, how
does the supervisor reviewing your work get at this large electronic data
for audit review and validation purposes? That is, to validate your
did everything correctly and accurately?
/ files that are used for an audit, but not specifically documented in
hard copy for the workpapers. For example, let's say you extract from
a financial database contract payments into a database or spreadsheet
and it is fairly large. Then you take a sample from this to use for
audit tests. Not a question about documentation of how you do the sampling
and the testing & results. However, how do you provide documentation on
the audit universe data used for this testing when you may not want to
or need to print out a hard copy of a lot of data, maybe several
hundred pages? Obviously you can save an electronic copy of large files like
this on your hard disk, server's hard disks, CDs, etc. However, how
does the supervisor reviewing your work get at this large electronic data
for audit review and validation purposes? That is, to validate your
did everything correctly and accurately?
