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News

Press Release

NYSSCPA Responds to Institute’s Effort

By:
Alonza Robertson, NYSSCPA Media Relations Manager
Published Date:
Sep 28, 2012

New York (September 28, 2012) – In a recent exposure draft, the AICPA makes its case for establishing IT standards with the financial audit in mind. The NYSSCPA supports this effort and provided targeted feedback to the institute’s proposal.

“The advances in technology in auditing created a growing need for this Audit Data Standard. So the AICPA’s response - by way of this exposure draft - is both timely and relevant,” said Yigal Rechtman, a member of NYSSCPA’s Technology Assurance Committee, and principal drafter of the Society’s comment letter.
 
The draft – developed by AICPA’s Emerging Assurance Technologies Task Force and released July 18th – contains audit data standards that address both the technical design and supplemental questions about the data that would be essential for understanding its use.
 
The New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants (NYSSCPA) reviewed the standards which were organized into three sections: Base Standards, standards that apply to multiple audit data extracts; General Ledger Standards, additional standards specific to general ledger data extracts; and Accounts Receivable Standards, additional standards specific to accounts receivable data extracts.
 
And while NYSSCPA recognizes the benefits and value of uniformity, the Society did offer several suggestions about the General Ledger Standards in its comment letter response.
 
 “We highlighted the proposed features that could be helpful for auditors such as time-stamping of journal entries, expansion of types of records to be used in audit sampling, and enhancing protection against identity theft,” he said.
 
The NYSSCPA reviewed the Audit Data Standards’ General Ledger section and offered comments on five questions in that section.  
 
For example, NYSSCPA made several comments about file formats and field formats that should exceptions to the proposed standards.
 
“With respect to fields that should not be created we caution the task force to avoid having fields with internal user information,” the NYSSCPA wrote in response. “Internal user information, other than a USER_ID field could be used for identity theft, “phishing” and other unauthorized activities.”
 
The NYSSCPA also proposed the creation of two new record types to account for records that were unavailable at the time of the data extract needed for the audit; and commented on when journal entries should be recognized in financial statements.
 
Comments on the AICPA exposure draft on Audit Data Standards closed on September 17, 2012. Go tohttp://www.nysscpa.org/commentletter/asec.pdf to read the complete NYSSCPA comment letter.