The Use of Computer Applications in Public Audit (External)

Abstract

The public audit is a mechanism of control that ensures that the public funds are allocated and used in accordance with the applicable legal framework. The Romanian Court of Accounts exercises the external public audit of public funds through the following types of actions: financial audit, performance audit and compliance audit. An efficient audit technique is represented by the use of the CaseWare IDEA (Integrated Data Extraction and Analysis) computer application, which offers extraction, totalization, sampling and editing functions to identify errors, problems, frauds and trends. The external public auditors of the Chambers of Accounts are trained and use, in part, the CaseWare IDEA computer application, obtaining significant results in terms of working time efficiency. It is proposed to further disseminate the findings made with the CaseWare IDEA computer application to external public auditors who do not use it and to increase the degree of training in using this software product.