A data-driven approach to audit and accountancy
Discover how data visualisation can transform the audit and accountancy sector.
The Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO), working in collaboration with Audit Scotland and the Wales Audit Office set out to develop a data enabled public sector audit approach which makes use of analytics techniques and machine learning.
The challenge was to develop a holistic, data-enabled audit approach ca- pable of capturing, extracting, cleansing, formatting, interpreting, analys- ing, and presenting data from a range of sources. This involved analysing and audit testing whole financial transaction populations and identifying high-risk transactions, anomalies, and potential irregularities for further human investigation.
The solution
Xamine provides an innovative, automated, transparent, and cost-effective way to transform service delivery through the intelligent use of data inte- gration and advanced analytics. The solution has been designed with four core components in mind:
- standardised Extract, Transform, Load of data from multiple financial sources;
- a customisable, user-driven risk assessments and user-driven rule creation;
- automation of the existing audit reporting processes;
- detection of financial anomalies – bringing together data and systems to create a single view of all the information available.
The solution ingests, normalises, processes and visualises finan- cial accounting data from public and private sector organisa- tions. The solution uses advanced Time Series Anomaly Detec- tion to inform users of anomalous spending within specific, user defined subcategories.
The impact
The solution demonstrated to the customer that a data-en- abled approach to audit was achievable while meeting their regulatory requirements. The solution demonstrated the ability to stratify transactions by risk and highlight anomalies in an automated fashion, which delivered added value and quality for their public sector clients.
