Auditing Information Systems, Second Edition

3.1. OTHER BENEFITS OF AUDIT PROGRAMS

Audit programs can also assist audit management in resource planning. For example, management can estimate the total number of hours required to perform an audit based on the expected amount of time required to perform each of the steps in the audit program. Another benefit of audit programs is that they can help promote consistency in tests performed on audits of the same process from one cycle to the next. During planning and preparation for an audit, audit programs used during the previous audit usually can be employed as the basis for the steps to be performed during the current audit. This obviously does not apply in cases in which the process has never been audited before or where the process has changed significantly. In these cases, new audit programs must to be created.

Audit programs can also promote consistency in tests performed on controls that are common to all processes. For example, in many organizations, system security administrators perform additions, changes, and deletions of users and their access capabilities. Department managers are responsible for authorizing the access capabilities granted to their employees by these system security administrators. In these cases, it may be more practical to examine the system access capabilities of users as each particular process or department is audited rather than trying to examine the access capabilities of all users at one time. If an audit department elects to examine user access ...