Question

Assignment:

you are to pick one of the articles below. Provide a synopsis of it and explain how it helps security or audit functions. It should show your analysis and critical thinking and is generally 2-3 paragraphs.

1: What Every IT Auditor Should Know About Transforming Data for CAATs, by Tommie W. Singleton, Ph.D., CISA, CGE IT, CITP, CMA, CPA

2: Auditing Small IS/IT Organizations: When Is an IS/IT Organization Small?, by Ed Gelbstein, Ph.D.

Answer 1

Dear student, I am picking up the first article below i.e., what every IT auditor should know about transforming data for CAATs and here is the analysis of the article

1) Nowadays most of the transactions made are through the usage of computer tools which are termed as computer-assisted audit tools/techniques (CAATs) where most of the transactions are done online.

2) As transactions are becoming a paperless and huge amount of data is being generated which is becoming Bigdata.  

3) According to the Berkeley School of Management from 2011-2020, the amount of data is said to have a rise of 50% and the increase in the number of IT professionals will be 1.5% only.

4) As the data is huge the Dataware house segment has developed extract transform load (ETL) techniques and tools.

5) There are three types of issues caused due to data extraction

i) It may contain various formatting issues in accordance with documents.

ii) While representing the various data values such as negative numbers in parentheses which cannot understand that easily.

iii) when the data providing is not optimal for using the CAATs command.

6) In simple words, we can come to the conclusion that IT professionals need to have a good idea about the tools that they are using which will help in executing the command properly for the auditing.