Copyright © 2006 ISACA. All rights reserved. www.isaca.org.

Why Companies Are Not Implementing Audit, Antifraud and Assurance Software…and How to Fix It
By Dean Brooks and Rich Lanza, CPA-CITP, CFE, PMP hy doesn’t everyone have a comprehensive suite of audit software tools? This is an interesting question. In business, certain tools are taken for granted as being needed by essentially everyone. Everyone who uses a personal computer has e-mail and a web browser, a spreadsheet and a word processor. A new hire sitting down at his/her PC for the first time would be astonished—maybe even insulted—if these basic tools were not available. Auditors have these tools like anyone else. But if we try to define even one software tool specific to the audit profession that is required on top of these basics, we fail. It does not matter if one breaks down the profession into categories and looks just at internal or external auditors, fraud examiners, IT auditors, audit managers, etc. No category has an indispensable tool that every person needs. The strange thing about this is that software excels at processing huge amounts of information in rigorous, repeatable ways—and auditing is nothing if it is not rigorous and repeatable. Why are so many proven, powerful productivity tools begging for users? In researching the 2005 Buyer’s Guide for Audit, Anti-Fraud, and Assurance Software, the authors studied more than 100 software products and spent more than 500 hours analyzing them. About half of these were designed specifically for auditors and accountants, often by other auditors and accountants. In nearly every product area, a similar story was found: auditors are slow to adopt professional software created for their needs. It did not appear to matter very much whether the task was risk management, project management, control self-assessment, fraud investigation, data analysis or even routine tasks such as generating confirmation letters. The largest single share of work in any