ACL: Introduction & Tutorial

Fraud Data Analysis Examples of Fraud tests in ACL: Comparing employee addresses with vendor addresses to identify employees posing as vendors Searching for duplicate check numbers to find photocopies of company checks Searching the list of vendors to identify those with post office boxes for addresses. These can be easily extracted from the vendor file for further follow-up Analyzing the sequence of all transactions to identify missing checks or invoices Identifying all vendors with more than one vendor code or more than one mailing address Finding several vendors with the same mailing address

Fraud Data Analysis Methodology Plan your Project Acquire the Data Access the Data with ACL Verify the Integrity of your Data Analyze the Data Report your Findings

What is ACL? Tool developed in the 1970s to assist auditors with the testing of large data sets Primarily identifies trends and locates errors Enables auditors to: Efficiently handle large files Perform data manipulation Provide statistical and quantifiable detail to support audit findings Benefits: Reduces audit risk Handles various file types Avoids accidental data modification by using an image Processes data quickly and efficiently

What is ACL? Challenges: Why is ACL used? Producing valid output Requesting correct data Communication between accounting and IT departments Why is ACL used? Framework that provides powerful analytics on data without manipulation Original data will not be altered in ACL Allows for simple and thorough documentation Keeps a perpetual log of all actions executed!

Importing Sample Data Set On the ACL main page, select “Create a new project”: Title the project “ACL_Tutorial” and save to desktop:

Importing Sample Data Set In the “data definition wizard”, select platform as “disk” and search for location of the .txt file “Transactions_Sample_Data”: On the next screen (Select Data), select “PCs and all other types of computers (ASCII) and click “Next”

Importing Sample Data On the following screen, select “Delimited text file”, click “Next” This screen simply verifies the column headers & data types, click “Next”:

Importing Sample Data In the window that displays, rename the file to “Transactions_Sample_Data.fil” and save to desktop, click “Next”

Importing Sample Data The final screen is for verification, simply click “Finish”: Lastly, the current table will be renamed to your data file name, “Transactions_Sample_Data” automatically, just click “OK”:

ACL Interface, Basic Commands You can now open the data table that you just imported by clicking on it in the Project Navigator panel (on the left): *Use the “ACL 9 Quick Guide” PDF to become acclimated with the ACL interface as well as run some basic commands on the Transactions_Sample_Data table.