Oracle EBS and Auditing Standard 5

One of the major changes introduced in the past is the implementation of Auditing Standard 5. It is said that the new standard can reduce the efforts by allowing the external auditors rely on the work performed by the management. This may have been a blessing for all the companies because they can now talk about reducing their audit expenses.

In the next few articles, we shall see how Auditing Standards 5 (AS5) can be implemented in Oracle EBS, thereby reducing the efforts spent on audits.

As part of understanding controls, controls in any organization can be segregated by definition,

• Manual controls - Controls that require manual intervention (examples would be review performed on documents)
• IT dependent controls - controls that are dependent on IT (examples would be generation of documents and performing review)
• Automated controls - Controls are automated or part of the system configuration (examples would be system configuration or settings of an application)

In general automated controls are generally never changed after implementation, because these affect the overall performance of the system. Therefore controls of these nature can be incorporated under AS5, where in the previous years, if the control was effective and if it can be proven that there have been no changes made to the configuration in the current year then the control can be assumed to performing effectively and no further testing of the control is required.

We shall see in further articles how the above can be incorporated in Oracle EBS for each of the applications. In Oracle there is no concept of modules (General Ledger, Receivables) and these are categorized as applications.