The control environment in today’s business is complex, risky and dynamic. The personal risk exposure of Audit Committee members, C-suite executives and Independent Directors are significantly higher than before, necessitating increased expectations on the quality of audit delivered by auditors.

Today’s auditor holds diverse responsibilities – related to risk assessments, fraud risk exposures, data quality, quality of audit approach and tests performed. COSO 2013 has laid significant emphasis on the non-financial and external reporting aspects and has embraced the extended enterprise concept. It has also provided significant emphasis on information technology.

The conventional methods of audit, which involved inspection of sample data with relatively higher level of manual intervention, are now under inspection. With a changing corporate landscape and control environment, a data driven audit approach is an imperative. Auditors now need to look into structured and unstructured data sources both within and outside the entity to define their audit universe and plan accordingly.