Advances in information technology (IT) present important new organizational risks, and the assessment and management of these risks may involve a variety of groups, including internal auditors, external auditors, in-house IT experts, and outside consultants. To begin to understand how organizations are addressing their IT risks, this exploratory study examines the IT-related activities of one group—internal auditors.
Information gathered from over 100 internal audit directors indicates that internal auditors focus primarily on traditional IT risks and controls, such as IT asset safeguarding, application processing, and data integrity, privacy, and security. Much less work is done on system development and acquisition issues. Several factors are associated with internal auditors' performance of IT evaluations, including the nature of the audit objective, the prevalence of computer audit specialists on the internal audit staff, and the existence of new computerized systems. To supplement these results, we encourage further research on the efforts of other groups in addressing IT risks.
This study examines the extent to which undergraduate accounting programs are integrating information technology (IT) across the curriculum. Based on responses from nearly 70 accounting programs, respondents believe that integrating IT into the curriculum is important, but (1) few departments have an IT policy, (2) coverage of general IT topics is minor to moderate, and (3) student usage of computer applications is fairly low. The main technical barriers to IT integration are inadequate lab personnel and continual changes in technology.
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