Monitoring & Auditing

From a manufacturing perspective, the term Statistical Process Control is well known and still pertinent in both process and job costing environments. From an accounting perspective, control has always had relevance and the ability to automate the auditing of controls has been a topic of discussion in the accounting industry for several years.

Monitoring and auditing of key business processes and controls has been at the forefront of audting best practice improvements for many years.  For example, the audting of claims processing for insurance companies has always been a key concern for this historically fraud intensive business process.   Very similar to Statiscal Process Control for manufacturing, there are leading practice organizations that are implementing the latest discipline for monitoring and auditing that has been termed "continuous auditing" or "100% auditing" by the auditing industry analysts.

Software companies and service providers that provide continuous monitoring capabilities have jumped on the continuous auditing bandwagon and often describe their offerings as achieving both objectives.  There is a significant difference between continuous monitoring and continuous auditing.  Auditors do not "monitor" operations and likewise IT Operators do not "audit" operations.  The concept of segregation of duties is central to this discussion. 

One of the main barriers to continuous monitoring and auditing has been the ability to capture data with enough frequency (e.g. real time) to support the business process analytics required to support a "continuous" process.  Since there is a growing number of vendors with continuous monitoring solutions for IT security, extended support for continuous auditing may be on the near horizon but remains a different discipline represented by different business requirements.