PPT Audit Scotland, SIGMA Workshop on Digital Auditing for SAIs, Skopje, November 2019

1. Audit Scotland
Digital Strategy
Morag Campsie
November 2019

2. 2
Agenda
People
Strategic
leadership
Culture
Complexity
and pace of
change
Skills
• Introduction to Audit Scotland
• Overview of our Digital Strategy
and progress to date
• Digital auditing-
• Data warehouse project and
data visualisation
• General ledger analytics

3. What we do
3
Our role
Assure the people of Scotland that public money is spent properly
and provides value for money
Our Vision
Be a world-class audit organisation that improves the use of public money

4. 4
What do we audit?

5. Our organisation
5
Budget: £28m
People: 278

6. Key issues facing Scotland
6

7. Digital Strategy
7

8. 8

9. Principles for a digital future
9

10. 10
Auditing digital government
Challenges
• Culture:
• Risk averse versus ‘fail fast’
• Designing services around users
• Start with the problem
• Multidisciplinary teams
• Pace of change:
• Understanding new ways of working and
new technology
• Governance
• Knowing what good looks like
• Skills
Embedding Digital in what we do:
• Helping to improve- Digital Principles published in 2017
• Commitment in our 5 year work programme to look at digital
across the public sector each year, including:
• Enabling digital government report published in June 2019
• Commentary in other performance audits, Best Value audit
reports and local Annual Audit Reports on local digital
programmes
• Establishment of Digital Advisory Panel- members from public,
private and third sector
• Training in Agile provided to staff involved in specific audits
• Embedding ICT audit work into local audit work

11. 11
Digital
auditing
Audit
intelligence
Digital
services
strategy
Data
analytics
(tools and
guides)
Collaboration
with other
audit
agencies
Data
visualisation

12. 12
Digital audit
Challenges
• Needs investment and to be championed from
the top
• Skills and capacity
• Knowing what is possible
• Need to take people with you- mainstreaming
digital audit tools and techniques
• Data:
• Reliability
• Quality
• Consistency
• Infrastructure and capacity
Progress to date
• Inhouse tools developed to help financial auditors with planning
and identify higher risk transactions and mapping of the financial
ledger to the accounts. Currently in use on around 20 audits.
• New tools being developed to improve internal reporting and
monitoring.
• Developed a Data Warehouse. Mainly holds data for
performance audits
• Widespread use of tableau to support performance audit
publications
• Working collaboratively with WAO, NIAO and NAO colleagues to
develop new tools.

13. 13
Digital capacity
Challenges
• Skills of leadership
• Creating right culture:
• multidisciplinary teams
• collaborative
• taking people with you
• Recruiting and retaining right skills
• Knowing what skills we need now and in the
future
Progress to date
• Staff training in:
• R programming/coding (e.g. datacamp)
• Agile programme management
• Data warehouse
• Excel and other tools such as Tableau
• Use of student placements to help take projects forward
• Trialling new software packages (e.g. PowerBI)
• Dedicated specialist resource to develop Data Warehouse
• Data Analytics and Statistic groups
• developing the skills and talent we have and using them to
support and train others
• Alignment of digital audit activity between different teams
(Financial and performance auditors, IT auditors, Communications,
Digital Services)

14. Financial audit data analytics

15. • Audit interface uses Excel PowerPivot
• Puts everything we have into one
“data model” or “cube”
• Journal data
• Chart of Accounts
• Account Areas
• Transaction Streams
• Materiality
• Prior years
• Key risks
• A standard cube used for each audit
• Calculations (e.g. sample size) and
extractions are done within the
spreadsheet
GLiQ – General Ledger Information Query Tool

16. Payroll trends
- ratios
- time sequence
- cumulative trend
Showing trends and providing assurance

17. Account area analysis
Select an account area, and
GLiQ shows what is in it
Material areas are easily
identifiable and there are
tools to explore the content in
more detail
17
Quickly highlighting key areas

18. GLiQ Sampling

19. Moving to R
Trialling R studio
Account area analysis
R is fast and has good tools:
- shinydashboard
- flexdashboard
We are working to create:
- audit working papers
- planning and auditing dashboards
- risk assessment algorithms

20. Challenges
• Needs investment and to be championed from the top!
• Not enough people with the right skills
• Financial data in different formats
• difficult and time consuming to extract and validate
• Auditors have little time to try and test new tools
• getting buy-in
• Infrastructure
20

21. Audit Intelligence- data warehouse
“Audit Intelligence is
everything we know about the
bodies we audit and the
environment they work in”
- A young Audit Scotland whizz kid

23. Pre-Scoping Evidence PublicationReporting
How should it be used?
Appraisal Scoping Flyer Fieldwork
Scoping
Dashboard

24. + Benefits
Enhanced processing power
Data is ‘Analysis ready’
Formatted
Join different data sets
Time saved
Published data history
Original raw data sources
Permissions
- Challenges
Getting the right people
Takes time to identify data and
get in right format
Data quality issues
Relationships with providers
Auditors need to understand it
and have confidence in it

25. Data
visualisation
example

26. Helping auditors understand data
26
• Published NHS
waiting times data, in
an Excel table.
• Used for annual
sector overviews,
performance reports
and by local auditors
to compare and
assess performance
in areas.

27. 27
Helping auditors understand data

28. 28
Helping the public understand
• Exhibit from the report – on a
patient experience survey
• Could only fit a certain amount of
information into an infographic,
while keeping it readable
• Use of the tableau icon, which
can be clicked on to link to the
tableau output

29. 29
Helping the public understand- Interactive tools

30. Other outputs and social media
30

31. 31
Summary
People
Strategic
leadership
Culture
Complexity
and pace of
change
Skills
• It’s challenging and no one has
cracked it all!

32. Find out more on our digital eHUB
Link to eHUB

33. Questions and comments
33