OREANDA-NEWS. April 09, 2010. Professionals of FBK Department of Audit Methodology and General Audit Department with assistance of experts of Department of Support and Developmaent of Informatio Technologies designed and implemented a program for automation of audit process “Audit DA” on IBM Lotus platform which is based on effective audit standards and allows the auditor to conduct work with better quality.

The program is meant for keeping audit files in compliance with Russian audit standards and can be applied at every stage of audit, starting from initial stating of strategy and plan of audit to final stages: drawing up of audit report. All documents are kept electronically, including audit programs, auditor’s working papers and soft copies of client’s documents in free format: text, graphical etc.

Till recent time procedure for documenting audit, especially of major companies has been rather awkward and tedious: auditors had to fill in by hand a great number of paper documents, to store bulky paper archives. At most they had to work with a great number of scattered electronic documents, which rather complicated control over completeness of audit: at times control would take not less time than the audit itself. To facilitate auditor’s life and to solve a lot of tasks at the same time the program “Audit DA” was created.

The two principle objectives, according to Natalya Kulakova, Deputy Director of FBK General Audit Department was documenting process of audit in compliance with audit standards and enhancing procedure for control over quality of auditors’ work. Both of them were solved. At the same time there occurred opportunity of direct control over completeness of audit (quality controller sees the whole list of documents created by the auditor) and depths of audit (if needed, electronic archives can be retrieved and course of audit for almost any period can be analyzed).

Another issue is automation of the process of creating audit forms in compliance with the chosen strategy and plan of audit inspection. It’s known that the process of audit is a set of procedures, regulated by federal standards of audit and from January 2010 it is also regulated by standards of self-regulating organizations (SRO). FBK is a member of PKF International Limited, a network of legally independent firms, which is a member of Forum of Firms of International Federation of Professional Accountants and applies international audit standards, elaborated by International Federation of Professional Accountants. FBK Methodical Audit Committee every year elaborates recommendations and provisions (procedures) for conducting audit and structure of documents, which FBK auditors should fill in during audit considering amendments in effective standards of audit, accounting and tax accounting. On the basis of these methodical provisions standard sample forms are generated in program “Audit DA”. The auditor chooses the forms needed for work and fills them in. According to nature of the audit conducted and specifics of entities audited the auditor may need different sets of forms. Such opportunity is provided by the program: any accounting policy adopted in one or another entity can be examined with a set of standard elements (“forms”) of the program. Hence commonality of procedure increases while less time is required for preparation and lounge of the project. As the result, time is saved. According to Director of FBK Department for IT Support and Development, Yury Nemcheninov, using program “Audit DA” allows increasing efficiency of work of auditors by 15% minimum.

With implementation of the program, using means provided by Lotus platform for managing docflow several additional tasks helping auditors and enhancing quality of their work were managed/solved.

• The program helps to authorize users. Every action of authorized user is reflected in documents he/she fills in and it is always possible to detect the author of changes introduced into documents of audit project.

• The program allows creating workgroups (audit teams), each member of such team has access to project documents.

• The program allows for setting hierarchy of members of the team and provides to them different rights in terms of editing documents in the following “role positions” in the process of audit: auditor, head of audit, quality controller.

• Within the workgroup duties and competences can be distributed among participants of the project so that each of them could implement the tasks assigned by the head of the project.

• Due to exploitation of Lotus Noted platform audit teams receive opportunity of remote work and distributed group work with one document. The issue of transportability of work place can also be solved if it is required during on-site audits: on auditor’s mobile device (i.e. laptop) client program is implemented, required documents are created, later they can be transferred to general database and can be used by other participants of the project.

• If needed the whole set of documents generated by auditors in the process of audit can be presented as electronic lists with links and subdocuments

The program was successfully brought to service and has already shown its efficiency in solving the tasks it was meant for. Moreover, according to Sergey Shapiguzov, FBK President,“at the moment FBK are considering the issue of sharing this result with major Russian audit companies”.