Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

15–10. Create an On-Line Internal Audit Library

An internal audit team will go on most audit engagements without a great deal of company expertise to back them up. If they encounter an unusual problem in the field, they have no one to turn to for advice. Similarly, if they encounter a control problem, they have no way of knowing if it is an isolated issue or if it has been uncovered in other places within the company. These problems can be reduced by setting up an on-line internal audit library that contains records from previous completed audits, as well as who worked on them and how they can be accessed. Further, the library can hold updates on all of the most recent accounting standards, as well as cross-indexed data on problems or unusual audit scenarios encountered during other company audits. By accessing this information, audit teams can save a great deal of research time that would otherwise be spent combing through the company directory or the paper-based audit files to find the same information.

Setting up such a system requires each internal audit manager to create an electronic summary-level report on each audit as it is completed, which is then forwarded to the company webmaster for inclusion in the library. Also, accounting standards can be easily obtained from various CD-based products for posting on the on-line library. Be sure to obtain an accounting standards product that contains an index search capability, so that users can easily search for items of particular ...