Smarter, faster, and better are all important desires of the modern internal audit organization. In answer to these demands, Deloitte this week introduced a new advanced analytics platform to offer internal auditors a comprehensive way to support the end-to-end audit process combined with state-of-the-art data visualization, risk sensing, and analytic techniques.

“The Internal Audit profession is in a state of transformation," said Carey Oven, managing partner of Deloitte's internal audit transformation practice. "Stakeholders are challenging chief audit executives to do more with less and boost confidence levels in the outcomes."

The Deloitte Analytics Platform (DAP) provides internal audit the ability to identify, audit, and report on organizational risk within a single platform. Using the platform, internal auditors will experience a more complete view of their organization’s transactions, delivering the ability to identify potential issues and get to the root cause more quickly.

The DAP provides internal auditors the ability to:

Make data-driven decisions that can optimize operations and reduce enterprise wide risks and costs;

Bring greater integration across internal audit, risk management, and compliance;

Further insight into the emerging risks of an organization; and

Continuously monitor controls, risks, and indicators with focused attention on performance and not on control effectiveness.

The DAP leverages a library of several hundred indicators, such as data attributes, that can be generated for each transaction, business process, and/or entity. The indicator library is both flexible and robust, facilitating customization based on industry, risk profiles, or known business issues. It then uses a proprietary risk engine with predefined rules for combining and measuring indicators and profiles to assign several types of risk scores. The data is enriched with a library of external sources, such as fraud perception indices, Office of Foreign Assets Control compliance lists, and address validation, to deliver a context-rich analysis.

With a Web-based interface and customizable data visualizations, the results of risk profiles can be reviewed, investigated, and narrowed for further review or sampling based on the calculated risk scores. The interface can be accessed locally or remotely in order to fit the internal audit plan and team makeup. In cases where remote access would be prohibitive for the internal audit team, transaction-level audit workbooks can be created from the consolidated data repository for offline use and reference.

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