Computerized techniques and interactive software can help auditors focus their efforts on the areas of greatest risk. Auditors can choose to exclude low risk transactions from their review and to focus on those transactions that contain a higher probability of fraud. Audit software also provides auditors with the ability to extract information from several files, with different database management systems, in order to search for underlying patterns or relationships among data. For example, reviewing data from the accounts payable and the contracting databases may reveal a concentration of contracts with one vendor all initiated by the same contracting officer, leading to concerns about possible kickbacks. Auditors can form an initial hypothesis, test that hypothesis, and revise it as necessary based on the results of interactive analyses.
Computerized techniques can assist the auditor in identifying symptoms early in the life of a fraud.
Automated routines that monitor key symptoms and track trends can be a major deterrent of fraud, preventing some fraudulent activities and identifying fraud almost as soon as it occurs. Analysis A growing area of fraud prevention and detection involves the examination of patterns in data. The rationale is that unexpected patterns can be symptoms of fraud. A simple example of the application of this technique is a search for duplicate transactions, such as identical invoice or vendor numbers for the same amount. The existence of duplicates would be an unexpected pattern in the data and indicate possible fraud.