Our credit union team has experience working with over 100 credit unions, ranging in size from $1 Million in assets to $1 Billion. Based on this experience, our audit programs have been customized to focus on key areas of financial risk. These programs provide us with substantial time efficiencies in the audit planning and audit scope development process.
Our initial audit step will be to discuss with management our audit plans and strategies and tentative scheduling. As part of our risk assessment and planning processes, we will discuss with management and the Supervisory Committee their specific areas of concern along with their expectations from the audit.
Our firm will prepare a pre-audit listing to be sent to the credit union requesting specific information to be captured from the data processing system and other sources for the audit period. This request list will also request specific information to be provided by the credit union to prepare confirmations for mailing to holders of credit union investments, bank accounts and other entities. This request list will also contain a listing of information that we will need to perform pre-fieldwork analytical procedures in our offices. Pre-field work will start in our offices, and will include significant planning and preparation of information to assure maximum efficiency in performing your audit.
When fieldwork is ready to begin, we will again discuss with management and the Supervisory Committee to confirm our understanding of your expectations. Fieldwork will include additional testing of controls not completed during the pre-fieldwork procedures, substantiation of account balances, tests of controls, testing of income statement accounts and analysis of the credit union’s procedures and accounting estimates.
Special Credit Union Programs and Questionnaires
In general, our audit program is based on the industry standard audit guides modified by our many years of experience in auditing credit unions. Our audit programs are comprehensive tools for planning and performing your audit and reporting on those audit results to your credit union. Our overall approach to performing credit union engagements is to design an audit plan and risk assessment which will maximize quality and efficiency of the audit.
Our audit programs are designed to meet regulatory audit requirements for state and federally chartered credit unions. The audit is an in-depth analysis and review of the credit union’s accounting and financial records. In addition to the financial audit, we complete a review of the internal accounting controls risk assessments and test for appropriate regulatory compliance. Traditionally, the primary objective of the financial audit was to evaluate the fairness of financial statement presentation. We take our audit engagement a step further to provide you with effective recommendations designed to streamline operations, identify potential problems and ultimately allow you to provide more efficient service to your members.
In addition to our specialized audit programs, our work will also consist of analytical review procedures to highlight the most meaningful data and trends. The risk assessment, combined with these analytical procedures helps us avoid extensive test work of transactions and account balances which are lower risk in nature.
Computer Processing Systems
Our present clients have a variety of computer processing systems ranging from in-house systems to on-line service bureau systems. We have developed programs and questionnaires tailored to test internal control procedures for these systems as a part of our examination.
Data File Driven Audit Approach
Our audit approach will be built on the planning/understanding and risk assessment stages of the audit. When performing field work, our audit team approach is very data file driven. What this means to your credit union is that many of the reports used by the credit union need not be reprinted or regenerated. We will be able utilize the credit unions imaging and cold storage programs to obtain many of the reports needed. This ultimately reduces time to retrieve reports and allows our audit test work to be more comprehensive as well improve the timeliness of our audit services.
Our services include the use of ACL (Audit Command Language) as a key part of our audit approach. By the use of data query (mining), we are able to analyze (independently), key information about your loan and share portfolio, generate member verification notices, and other complex analysis contributing to a state-of-the-art audit approach, allowing credit union management to concentrate on credit union operations and not require as much time to focus on the audit.
We believe this to be smart auditing. Perform more thorough test work and be more efficient. All with less intrusion on credit union management.