Harnessing technology builds confidence in audit professionals

At the EY global organization, our digital audit journey has taught us that those closest to the data hold important insights that unlock critical value.

Armed with powerful analytics, audit team members at the staff and senior levels are able to develop a nuanced understanding of the business and identify key risks quickly. The EY Digital Audit equips them to ask better and more insightful questions. In turn, our clients are learning from these pointed questions and may rethink their own processes and operations because of them.

In the case of a client that manufactures networking equipment, our people virtually observed the performance of inventory cycle counts at all the company’s plants around the globe. Their use of technology offered the client finance team access to a fuller picture of the data, uncovering additional new information on which plants were not following the company’s own policies.

At a multinational tech organization, our people demonstrated their expansive understanding of the client’s processes. This led the client’s finance team to develop their own insights on the complexities and inefficiencies of their processes and critically review their internal controls.

An EY senior manager in the US-Central Region explains the changing dynamic: “We’ve had such a positive experience with analytics. We can see the confidence in our staff and seniors — and in our clients. It’s really opened up a conversation with them about what else can be seen through the use of analytics and how we can audit differently.”

As EY executives coach their teams, demonstrate leadership and share their experience, they are also learning from the trends and anomalies that their team members are flagging in the data — insights that can spur them to dig deeper and to investigate potential risks that might not have come to light in a traditional audit.

We train our people to solve client-specific audit problems and arm them with intuitive tools that allow them to tailor their approach based on the engagement. Once our early career team members understand that they are free to innovate and explore efficient solutions, they tend to take bold action that drives continuous improvement. For example, one audit team used EY resources to identify better loan analysis dashboard and techniques, which led to the development of a commercial mortgage analyzer that is being scaled globally.

At the EY organization, we have created an innovation ecosystem that promotes such sharing and makes the best innovations from any source accessible to everyone. This ecosystem includes a micro-solutions marketplace we are piloting for access to tools, organized innovation networks with technology-equipped auditors splitting their time between client work and innovation, and certification policies in place that allow us to scale tools sector-wide and practice-wide. Feedback from users at every stage helps us test local tools and take them all the way to a certified product.

With the EY Digital Audit, every team member has the power to contribute new ideas to enhance audit execution and quality.

As team members are asked to demonstrate how they arrive at their conclusions, our clients appreciate the perspective EY people at every level bring to their business. This recognition spurs new conversations about innovating in other aspects of the audit.

Confident in the technologies we have given them, curious about the full possibilities of these tools, our early career auditors are becoming transformative leaders, ready to drive audit quality even higher as they wear both hats of auditor and technologist.