LUPIN - Open Source Financial Audit Tools

The process of creating a CDM for auditors has asked more questions than it has answered. My initial idea was a finite set of common terms which would relate to the main general ledger followed by a complementary set of terms which would relate to the most typical sub-ledgers, day books or schedules. These sets could be expanded as additional variables were encountered which other auditors would find useful to be able to analyse immediately. But somehow I forgot about the auditors themselves. Audit is a marvellous world awash with terminology that does not easily skew into the average conversation in a pub, "Materiality" being the big one, in all its glorious forms and values, but also the nuances of "significant" and "non-significant, "complex" and "non-complex". This is before we even get into classifications like "Assets" and "Liabilities". In short, what had seemed like a discrete task was no longer quite so straightf...

When I first approached the idea of a common data model (CDM), it was because our team and the teams in other audit agencies were all separately developing audit tools in R, and our respective directors were keen that we collaborated and achieved some efficiencies. Senior management love efficiencies. If we had a CDM, then we could swap chunks of R code with each other or easily work on one a single chunk together (for example, a fixed asset register analyser). I think this simplistic understanding of mine did a disservice to the value of devising a CDM. I should know this from my days as a philosophy student at QUB - philosophy of language (particularly Saussure, but also Quine) is one of the most interesting things anyone can spend time on. A CDM provides us with a common language that can not only easily be understood by humans but also by different chunks of the code. By creating an equivalency in definition, we create useful boundaries of meaning that allow the analysis to occur w...

W here it starts. I'm a musician (kidlupin.bandcamp.com), a chartered accountant and a data scientist (a wee bit). For the past six years I've worked in financial audit in Northern Ireland. I've audited lots of different organisations - companies, charities, public sector bodies, partnerships. I've come to the conclusion that financial audit needs a bit of a shake up. The introduction of the revised ISA 315 has resulted in a fairly major philosophical re-orientation of the audit approach. The new approach is more explicit on the importance of taking a risk-based approach. This, for the auditor, requires a more profound understanding of where risk lies in the audit of your client. There's a lot more that could be said here, however this is day one and at risk of becoming an old man screaming at clouds. I have decided that the best way I can improve audit quality in the light of the revised ISA 315 is to create an open source financial audit tool in R. Why do I think ...