Getting started with IDEA: The Ayrshire Councils Approach

Ayrshire Authorities Approach to Using IDEA – starting point In October 2014 North Ayrshire presented to East Ayrshire (EAC) and South Ayrshire (SAC) on “How Internal Audit at NAC uses IDEA”.

NAC IDEA Presentation to EAC and SAC The NAC presentation to EAC and SAC covered the following areas: Common IDEA Functionality used by NAC, including: – Extracting records – Key value extraction – Summarisation – Duplicate key detection and duplicate key exclusion – Joining databases – Appending databases – Random sampling Creditors CAATS Testing Payroll CAATS Testing Council Tax Arrears to Payroll Data Match

South Ayrshire NFI Exercise South Ayrshire has been using continuous audit across a range of systems for some time using both IDEA and Excel. SAC were at the time trying to match the NFI results with the current single person’s discount information held in the Council Tax system. IDEA didn’t like it  Light-bulb moment listening to Yvonne’s presentation. Success

Evaluating the use of IDEA In October 2014 EAC decided to upgrade to IDEA v9.2. The member of staff using IDEA was on secondment and IDEA had not been used; the upgrade was from version 7.2 In December 2014 the 3 Ayrshire Authorities attended the IDEA User Group meeting in Glasgow. At this meeting a representative from Grant Thornton presented the advantages of using IDEA and achieving the balance between the use of IDEA and Excel At the same meeting Auditware advertised both the Fuzzy Matching facility and their Certification Programme. South Ayrshire started considering the merits of the upgrade given the new functionality.

Evaluating IDEA training In December 2014 the three Ayrshires started considering training in IDEA data analysis level 1 with a view for them to then proceed to Level 2 and certification. EAC enquired re testimonials for accreditation and obtained a contact working for an English LA who had been using IDEA for years and was happy using the system and advised that training would be the right route to go. In December 2014 the 3 authorities agree to go ahead and purchase an in-house training hosted by South Ayrshire and to be attended by a total of 5 people (2 SAC, 2 EAC, 1 NAC)

In-house Training – benefits

All Ayrshire IDEA User Group meetings After NACs presentation to the group, a decision was taken to incorporate an IDEA subgroup meeting into the Ayrshire Audit Managers meetings which are held 3 times a year. The purpose of the IDEA subgroup is to: – Discuss how each authority is using IDEA to assist the audit process – this will help benefit NAC who are looking to further develop their use of IDEA. – Share any tips as well as to discuss any problems encountered and how we overcame them. – It also allows us to contact each other at any time if we come across any issues with using IDEA or are looking for advice on how to best carry out a test – we have already benefited from this type of communication. The sub group first met in May 2015 and we discussed the following: – NAC imported a PDF report into IDEA for the first time (felt confident to try this after the February IDEA Training). One of the issues I encountered was to exclude a certain field from this report. Once I realised how to do this, I shared it with the group. – EAC used IDEA for Scottish Housing Quality Standard and it proved to be a very useful tool as the summarisation was a fundamental part of the analysis – EAC spoke about their issues with date fields that are often not imported as dates and when you attempt to change the format within IDEA, it produces an error. Therefore analysis on dates could not be done. During the audit of SHQS meant this step had to be done in XL. It was suggested the next time this happens, they should contact IDEA support for advice. – Resulting from the February IDEA training, a group discussion highlighted the usefulness for carrying out some standard testing i.e. producing field statistics on numeric fields to give the user an understanding of the data being used.

EAC Continuous Audit – Payroll The plan is for client departments to take responsibility for this and audit will verify the work they do, using IDEA to confirm all exceptions have been captured. Initial work has been to perform the continuous auditing tests ourselves on Payroll, to assist in directing the client. Total of 28 possible continuous auditing tests identified from research (including work already done at North Ayrshire, South Ayrshire, previous audit work, and other sources). 21 of these tests were relevant to East Ayrshire and tested in IDEA. Report produced identifying areas which could benefit from continuous auditing and recommendations made to management. Use of IDEA: Testing mainly involved direct extractions, summarisations, stratifications, top records and appending fields. Formulas can be difficult/complex (e.g. support at IDEA was used to assist in identifying national insurance numbers which didn’t follow the correct format). Knowledge shared with NAC and SAC. Can be very quick to summarise information that would take longer to analyse elsewhere (e.g. hourly rates, gross salaries, harmony between grades/spinal points).

September 2015 – Intermediate IDEA Three Ayrshires took part in the Intermediate training in-house. Very intense and a lot of ground to cover but very worthwhile. CaseWare certification examination. – yes or no?

Advantages of training Systematic Good support materials / reference tools Repeated use of tools and functions Increased Confidence One difficulty: understand exactly what the exercise was to be conducted. Example day one advanced course - stock analysis.

Advantages of training Look at the following example: Would have never attempted anything like this Would not have been able to analyse this data

Report from client

Report saved in PDF

PDF imported in IDEA 3 layers