We received this question from an fraud audit director during SuperUser roundtable (4/16/08). While ACL is a popular audit analytics tool, it is not the only tool.  As most practitioners will attest, ACL is like a good tuba but only one piece of the orchestra. Therefore, we present a quick list of other [...]

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Benford’s law is commonly used by audit practitioners for testing data populations for evidence of possible fraud.  ACL even has a Benford function built into the software to prepare the requisite tables and display a Benford curve.
The Central Virginia ACL Users group posted an excerpt from a NY Times article that came out several years [...]

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A question that came up in SuperUser round-table (4/16/08) …
Should Internal Audit teams create specialty data analytics groups to do all analytics work or should they cross-train their audit “generalists” to use analytics tools?
In favor of the specialty data analytics group -

Highly-skilled data analytics professionals can be leveraged to perform all analytics tasks
Less-skilled audit “generalists” [...]

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During our ACL Power User round-table, we discussed the challenges in rapidly on-boarding new users. We anticipate that this topic will continue to be one of further discussion. We have identified the following training efforts in place at our respective companies:

Send new users to training courses sponsored by ACL or other vendors.
Holding in-house ACL [...]

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Another concern raised at the SuperUser round-table (4/17/08) applied to the “value proposition”. During the conversation, we recognized that the most difficult hurdle to reach when using audit analytics for testing or risk management was in getting the data from its I.T. home and preparing it for use in ACL. This process is [...]

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