Central Jersey ACL Users Group

                                                                                                                                Tax ID #: 80-0198378

1.   Registration Form

      Please fill out this registration form and email it to lcalamito@munichreamerica.com.

2.   a.   Select the program(s) you would like to register for:

b.   Complete the following information:

Name:__________________________________________________________

Company:_______________________________________________________

Address:________________________________________________________

City, State, Zip:__________________________________________________

Telephone:______________________________________________________

E-Mail Address:__________________________________________________

3.   Please make check payable to:

      Central Jersey ACL Users Group

      Mail your check with this completed form to:

Liz Calamito

Central Jersey ACL Users Group

c/o Munich Reinsurance America

555 College Road East

Princeton, New Jersey 08543

Questions? For further information, please feel free to contact Liz Calamito at 609-275-2137 or e-mail at lcalamito@munichreamerica.com.

USING ACL TO DETECT FRAUD – ACL 252

BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE CENTRAL JERSEY ACL USERS GROUP

SEPTEMBER 24 & 25, 2008

2-DAY SEMINAR – 16 CPE CREDITS

The Using ACL to Detect Fraud Workshop is an ACL run seminar being taught locally by an ACL Faculty Member. This is the same course in which you would have to travel to an ACL Seminar location and pay for transportation, lodging, and meals.

Designed for intermediate-level users of ACL, this two-day course introduces you to the use of ACL in fraud detection. in an interactive, hands-on environment, you will learn how to create tests for transaction authorization and validation and how to perform trend analysis on employee and merchant activity.

Course Objectives

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

· Perform data analysis tests to identify anomalies and policy non-compliances

· Perform trend analysis on the anomalies to identify cause and fraudulent activity

· Verify data quality and integrity

· Test transaction authorization and validation

· Create tests for purchasing and payables, travel and entertainment expenses, and procurement card expenses

· Describe the Benford’s Law theory and use Benford tests in ACL

Who Should Attend

Financial, Operational, External Auditors, Information Systems Auditors, and Audit Management.

Program Level

This is an intermediate-level course.

Prerequisites

Completion of an ACL 100-level course is strongly recommended or at least six months previous experience using ACL for data analysis. Participants should also have a background in fraud detection.

Course Method

This is a group-live, instructor-led course in a classroom setting. For in-class activities, participants use the latest version of ACL. The class size supports individual attention and development.

COST, TIME & LOCATION:

COST: $900.00

Make checks payable to: CENTRAL JERSEY ACL USERS GROUP

A registration form is attached to this invitation.

Mail payments to:

Liz Calamito

Central Jersey ACL Users Group

c/o Munich Reinsurance America

555 College Road East

Princeton, New Jersey 08543

DATES: Wednesday & Thursday – September 24 & 25 – All Day Seminar

TIME: 8:00am – 9:00am Registration & Cold Breakfast

9:00am – 5:00pm Seminar. A hot/cold luncheon will also be served and is included in the price of the seminar.

DRESS: Business Casual

RESERVATIONS & CANCELLATIONS: REQUIRED!!! Please reserve your spot now since seating is limited and kindly let us know if you need to cancel.

Any questions on registration or cancellations, please contact Liz Calamito at the following email address: lcalamito@munichreamerica.com.

LOCATION: The Conference Center at Mercer County Community College

1200 Old Trenton Road

West Windsor, New Jersey 08550

www.mccc.edu/cc

Telephone: 609-570-3643

DIRECTIONS:

From North or South via US 1:

• Exit onto Quakerbridge Road, South 533.
• After two miles, make a left onto Hughes Drive.
• Follow Hughes Drive past Mercer County Park entrance.
• Campus entrance is the next left.

From North or South via Interstate 95/295:

• Take Interstate 95 (which becomes Interstate 295) to Exit 65A, Sloan Avenue East.
• Follow Sloan Avenue (becomes Flock Road) to end (Edinburg Road).
• Make a left onto Edinburg Road to campus entrance (jughandle right).

From North via NJ Turnpike:

• NJ Turnpike to Exit 8
• Follow signs onto Route 133 West (the new bypass) toward Princeton.
• Take Route 133 West to the end exit immediately onto Route 571 West.
• Move immediately to the far left turning lane and turn left onto Route 535/Old Trenton Road.
• Follow Route 535/Old Trenton Road for approximately 5 miles.
• The College and Conference Center are on your right.

From South via NJ Turnpike:

• NJ Turnpike to Exit 7A (Interstate 195).
• West on I-195 to Exit 5B (first exit off of I-195).
• North on NJ Route 130 to second light.
• Make a left onto Robbinsville Allentown Road (Route 526 West).
• Go through traffic light and make immediate right onto Robbinsville Edinburg Road (Route 526 West).
• At the end of Route 526 West, make a left onto Old Trenton Road (Route 535).
• Follow Route 535 for two miles to campus entrance on right, after the Mercer County Park.

From East:

• Take Route 33 West and follow until you see signs for Route 133 West (the new bypass route).
• Make a right turn onto Route 133 West.
• Take Route 133 to the end and exit immediately onto Route 571 West.
• Move immediately to the far left turning lane and turn left onto Route 535/Old Trenton Road.
• Follow Route 535/Old Trenton Road for approximately 5 miles.
• The College and Conference Center are on the right.

CPE/SEMINAR INFORMATION:

LEVEL OF KNOWLEDGE: Intermediate

RECOMMENDED CPE CREDIT(s): 16

PREREQUISTE & ADVANCE PREPARATION: None

METHOD OF PRESENTATION: Group Live

For more information regarding administrative polices, such as complaints and refunds, please contact the Central Jersey ACL Users Group at lcalamito@munichreamerica.com or 609-275-2137.

DATA ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES: AN ACL WORKSHOP – ACL 201

BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE CENTRAL JERSEY ACL USERS GROUP

SEPTEMBER 22 & 23, 2008

2-DAY SEMINAR – 16 CPE CREDITS

The Data Analysis Techniques ACL Workshop is an ACL run seminar being taught locally by an ACL Faculty Member.  This is the same course in which you would have to travel to an ACL Seminar location and pay for transportation, lodging, and meals. 

This two-day course is designed for experienced ACL users. In an interactive, hands-on environment you will learn how to integrate ACL commands and expressions to accomplish complex data analysis tasks. You will also practice planning and executing a data analysis project by working through a series of case studies. Through this case-study approach you will learn how to effectively use ACL in real-life situations and discover what it means to think with ACL.

Course Objectives

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

·        Apply ACL in a structured audit analysis process

·        Identify project objectives in business and technical terms

·        Apply the necessary steps to achieve project objectives

·        Examine data elements and table structures

·        Test control totals, bounds, completeness, uniqueness, data relationships and reliability

·        Evaluate data to reveal exceptions

Who Should Attend

Financial, Operational, and External Auditors; Information Systems Auditors and Audit Management.

Program Level

This is an intermediate-level course.

Prerequisites

Participants should have a basic knowledge of Windows. No advance preparation is required.

Course Method

This is a group-live, instructor-led course in a classroom setting. For in-class activities, participants use the latest version of ACL. The class size supports individual attention and development.

COST, TIME & LOCATION:

COST:            $900.00

Make checks payable to: CENTRAL JERSEY ACL USERS GROUP

A registration form is attached to this invitation.

Mail payments to:

            Liz Calamito

            Central Jersey ACL Users Group

            c/o Munich Reinsurance America

            555 College Road East

            Princeton, New Jersey 08543

DATES:          Monday & Tuesday – September 22 & 23 – All Day Seminar

TIME:            8:00am – 9:00am          Registration & Cold Breakfast

                        9:00am – 5:00pm         Seminar.  A hot/cold luncheon will also be served and is included in the price of the seminar.

DRESS:          Business Casual

RESERVATIONS & CANCELLATIONS:     REQUIRED!!!  Please reserve your spot now since seating is limited and kindly let us know if you need to cancel.

Any questions on registration or cancellations, please contact Liz Calamito at the following email address: lcalamito@munichreamerica.com.

LOCATION:              The Conference Center at Mercer County Community College

                                    1200 Old Trenton Road

                                    West Windsor, New Jersey 08550

                                    www.mccc.edu/cc

                                    Telephone:  609-570-3643

DIRECTIONS:

From North or South via US 1:

• Exit onto Quakerbridge Road, South 533.
• After two miles, make a left onto Hughes Drive.
• Follow Hughes Drive past Mercer County Park entrance.
• Campus entrance is the next left.

From North or South via Interstate 95/295:

• Take Interstate 95 (which becomes Interstate 295) to Exit 65A, Sloan Avenue East.
• Follow Sloan Avenue (becomes Flock Road) to end (Edinburg Road).
• Make a left onto Edinburg Road to campus entrance (jughandle right).

From North via NJ Turnpike:

• NJ Turnpike to Exit 8
• Follow signs onto Route 133 West (the new bypass) toward Princeton.
• Take Route 133 West to the end exit immediately onto Route 571 West.
• Move immediately to the far left turning lane and turn left onto Route 535/Old Trenton Road.
• Follow Route 535/Old Trenton Road for approximately 5 miles.
• The College and Conference Center are on your right.

From South via NJ Turnpike:

• NJ Turnpike to Exit  7A (Interstate 195).
• West on I-195 to Exit 5B (first exit off of I-195).
• North on NJ Route 130 to second light.
• Make a left onto Robbinsville Allentown Road (Route 526 West).
• Go through traffic light and make immediate right onto Robbinsville Edinburg Road (Route 526 West).
• At the end of Route 526 West, make a left onto Old Trenton Road (Route 535).
• Follow Route 535 for two miles to campus entrance on right, after the Mercer County Park.

From East:

• Take Route 33 West and follow until you see signs for Route 133 West (the new bypass route).
• Make a right turn onto Route 133 West.
• Take Route 133 to the end and exit immediately onto Route 571 West.
• Move immediately to the far left turning lane and turn left onto Route 535/Old Trenton Road.
• Follow Route 535/Old Trenton Road for approximately 5 miles.
• The College and Conference Center are on the right.

CPE/SEMINAR INFORMATION:

LEVEL OF KNOWLEDGE:                                     Intermediate

RECOMMENDED CPE CREDIT(s):                                 16

PREREQUISTE & ADVANCE PREPARATION: None

METHOD OF PRESENTATION:                                       Group Live

For more information regarding administrative polices, such as complaints and refunds, please contact the Central Jersey ACL Users Group at lcalamito@munichreamerica.com or 609-275-2137.                     

For Extracting Data from a Source

• Monarch - Desktop software used to extract data from printed report files produced by legacy systems (i.e. print-image format) and convert it into tabular data for use by ACL, Excel, or some other database.
• SQL Bulk Copy Class - This is a Microsoft-provided .NET class that is used to import large recordsets into Microsoft SQL Server.  It is especially useful if the auditor needs to perform intensive data quality validations or apply business logic to the import process (doing so during import can cut down the processing time for large datasets).  The latest version is included with regular releases of the Microsoft .NET framework.  You can download a free desktop edition of Microsoft SQL Server Express and the bulk copy class which is robust enough for most small/medium ACL projects.
• Cron+scripts — Cron is the Unix scheduler service (similar to Windows Scheduler) that executes jobs on a regular basis.  Scripts are small computer programs written in a scripting language.  Basically, you write a script using the scripting language of your choice and execute it on a recurring basis using Cron.  ACL (Audit-Command LANGUAGE) is one such scripting language but others more frequently used in IT include PHP, Perl, Ruby, AppleScript, etc.  The Cron+scripts approach is a good one if you plan to be performing recurring extracts of data and applying your testing to them in an automated fashion.  Scripts are very extensible, so if you have to do complex sorts, queries, or combine data from multiple sources into one consolidated dataset, the Cron+script approach might be best for you.  Cron, like most Unix implementations is open-source as are most scripting languages.

For Analyzing Data

• Microsoft Access/Excel - Although Microsoft applications sometimes get a bad rap from ACL folk, they can be very useful in data analysis.  Access is the Microsoft desktop database and can perform joins between tables, sort, filter, and print reports.  Access 2007 makes some of these tasks fun with the new ribbon toolbar.  Excel is the spreadsheet of choice among business users and it does have some handy statistical tools as well.  Both solutions are better geared for smaller datasets (i.e. those less than 65k records), though the Office 2007 set does provide some capacity for larger datasets — though you might suffer a performance penalty if you use these tools for big data.
• SAS/SPSS/MiniTab — These three statistics packages are designed for hardcore statisticians, though SPSS is a little more geared for the liberal arts / social sciences mindset as it has tools for these professions built into the GUI.  SAS is a scripting engine that can be used in a Cron+scripting solution and it is geared for massive datasets, though the language can be a little esoteric — as any research graduate student can attest.  MiniTab is the favorite desktop statistics application among the Six Sigma elite and is commonly found among engineers.
• Caseware IDEA — This is a competitor to ACL in the desktop audit analytics space.  Like ACL, IDEA has a desktop client that auditors can use to sort/filter/join data and apply test results.  The server edition competes with ACL AuditExchange and provides workgroup access controls and shared data/test repositories.

For Printing Data Reports

• Crystal Reports — This is popular desktop reporting application that takes datasets large and small and renders them to paper or PDF printed reports.  Crystal Reports has features to sort, filter, and group data, and calculate subtotals.  Crystal Reports also has a powerful cross-tab reporting feature.  In the past ACL has used Crystal Reports to print ACL datasets, but the software can be connected to most commercial datasources from basic Excel spreadsheets to complex SAS data cubes.
• Adobe In-Design/In-Copy — Adobe In-Design and Adobe In-Copy are “sister applications” used in the publishing industry to render high-quality, graphical reports and layouts.  Variable Data Publishing (VDP) is a practice in marketing to tie professionally-produced report templates (i.e. company financial statements, glossy audit reports, direct mail advertisements) to data in databases and render print-ready materials.  Auditors can create In-Design templates for their reports and put XML placeholders in the pages for their audit test results.  Then they can match the template to the data file and produce a printed report.  It’s sort of like mail-merge on steroids.  Adobe In-Copy is used to change the text of In-Design pages without modifying the structure and could be used to reduce the amount of time it takes to prepare a printed report.

Of course, these are just a few applications that come to mind.  You can add your own in the comments box below.

The Central Virginia ACL Users group posted an excerpt from a NY Times article that came out several years ago that explains Benford’s law in plain English.  Check it out here.

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” can focus on executing audits and relying on analytics professionals  work product
• Lower expenses to implement audit analytics (i.e. software licensing fees, hardware) as fewer staff need to have the costly software or computer hardware to perform the tasks

In favor of cross-training all auditors to use analytics tools -

• High turnover in audit departments leads to shortage of skills and raises the risk that the ACL “gurus” may leave the group.
• Develops new skills among audit generalist to take on complex analytics tasks which will help them when they rotate into the business
• Greater acceptance of the value of analytics to the organization as more people become experienced in performing data analysis and using the result

Again, feel free to comment on this topic.

• Send new users to training courses sponsored by ACL or other vendors.
• Holding in-house ACL workshops
• Rotating individuals into an ACL job function for 3-months or more.

Feel free to comment on this posting if you have some suggestions on how to tackle ACL training effectively.

• How do we articulate the value of spending resources gathering data to perform audit analytics?
• Which individuals in our organizations do we need to get “buy-in”?
• How do we manage the change in our audit culture to adapt to audit analytics and make it a part of our daily processes?

Feel free to comment on this posting if you have some suggestions on how best to articulate the audit analytics value proposition.