Analytics can empower greater public sector audit efficiency and accuracy

How do public sector audit teams accomplish more with less resources?

As the demands on public sector auditors increase in scope and risks increase in velocity, audit teams need to work faster while maintaining full oversight of the organization. Fortunately, automation offers a powerful solution to help audit teams manage risks in real time and streamline time-consuming and repetitive processes.

From data analysis to monitoring to dashboarding and reporting, robotics process automation (robotics) can empower audit teams to get more done in less time, and greatly increase efficiency over time. Consider the advantages you'll gain from analytics technology and the options available for your team.

How robotics streamline and improve audit operations

By automating routine monitoring and data processing across the organization, audit teams can gain several key advantages, including:

• Enhanced risk intelligence: Robotics provide in-depth data with minimal manual input, giving organizations more comprehensive intelligence on key risks across all levels of the organization.
• Optimized efficiency: Automating repetitive processes such as data extraction and normalization allows audit to get critical analytics in a fraction of the time it takes to manually complete tasks.
• Improved data quality: Robotics decrease manual work which reduces the risk of human error, helping to improve overall data quality and accuracy.
• Cost and labor savings: As organizations look to increase cost efficiency amid economic uncertainty, robotics cut down on the operational time and team capacity needed for audits. In many cases, organizations may be able to rely on analytics robots in place of hiring a full-time data analytics employee.
• Continuous monitoring: Automation allows audit teams to go beyond getting a snapshot into operations within a short window of time. Instead, it enables round-the-clock oversight across the organization and can automatically alert decision-makers if an anomaly is identified.

What capabilities can robotics provide?

Audit teams can truly do more with less when they leverage automation for data analysis, automated workflows, and dashboarding and reporting.

Here are some of the functions your organization can manage through automation, without needing to hire or train a dedicated data analytics headcount.

Access controls analytics

With access controls analytics, organizations can maintain privileged access protocols while monitoring digital and physical access. Robotics can handle requirements such as identifying active users who are no longer employed, identifying all accounts with privileged access and flagging unusual systems activities.

Sanctioned screening analytics

As a key part of the third-party management process, these automations can compare customer datasets to an excluded or sanctioned list. Key capabilities include fuzzy name matching, National Provider Identifier (NPI) matching, and address matching between the master dataset and sanctioned or excluded lists.

Assurance analytics

Automation of assurance processes helps monitor customer transactional datasets. Capabilities include identifying customer duplicates, flagging irregular customer records and identifying irregularities or missing information in transactions.

Improper payments and potential fraud

This area of the organization is particularly vulnerable to human or system error, as well as fraud or control weakness. Accounts payable analytics can flag invoice duplicates, detect missing information, identify costs that exceed approval levels, and pinpoint other errors or abnormalities. For example, robots can monitor for travel and entertainment (T&E) payments so organizations can quickly identify and report on irregular activities

Run more operations with ACL Analytics – without adding headcount

Ready to leverage robotics to make auditing and reporting more efficient?

ACL Analytics from Diligent offers features designed exclusively for audit, risk and compliance professionals. Advanced data analysis, automated workflows and seamless dashboarding and reporting capabilities make day-to-day requirements easier and faster while increasing overall team capacity.

Further, our extensive list of analytics services makes implementing the analytics your organization needs — many of which are common across organizations — quick and easy. These can be downloaded from Diligent, and do not require additional staff to develop and implement.

ACL Analytics offers analytics across these five key categories:

1. Access controls analytics
2. Sanctioned screening analytics
3. Revenue assurance analytics
4. Accounts payable cost containment analytics
5. Travel and entertainment fraud analytics

Diligent offers these customizable analytics at a flat fee, so you can choose the best options for your unique auditing requirements. Learn more about Diligent's scalable ACL Analytics today.