Auditing Government Departments

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Description of Business

The Office of the Utah State Auditor is a state government department responsible for auditing the financial statements of various departments of the State and the public universities in the state of Utah. The Office is performs financial audits, performance audits, and special projects. The financial audit division performs financial statement and internal control audits for all the State departments, agencies, and colleges. The performance audit division audits agency programs and evaluates the effectiveness of their operations. The special projects division performs audits based on requests from citizens.

When I did a sample audit at the Office, I compared the records of the purchasing department with the accounting department to look for discrepancies between capital assets in the accounting department records and capital assets in the purchasing department records.

Overview of System

The program that I have created automates the process that I did by hand when I did a sample audit at the Office. A user puts the transactions from the current year on two preformatted sheets (one from purchasing and one from accounting) after exporting them from the respective department databases. The user is then able to click a few buttons and immediately see all of the problems with the transactions. The user can audit capital asset numbers and find items that should be classified as capital assets that are not, duplicates in the departments, items that should not be classified as capital assets that are, items that are not in the other department that should be, and items with invalid asset numbers. Auditing dates finds items that have the same asset number in both departments, but different dates, and finds invalid dates. Auditing departments finds items that have the same asset number in both departments, but different departments, and finds invalid departments. Auditing historical amounts finds items that have the same asset number in both departments, but different historical amounts, and finds invalid amounts. Finally, auditing for risky items finds items that have a higher risk of being misstated. After clicking the auditing buttons, transactions that are problems or potential problems are marked, and a summary report of the number and types of problems is displayed in aesthetic graphical form. The objective is to speed up the auditing process by automating the audit of most items, and pointing out potential problems for the auditor to think about.

Project Files:
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/14f/benste/FinalVBAProjectWriteUp_BenjaminStephens.pdf
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/14f/benste/FinalProject_BenjaminStephens.xlsm