ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the assessment of IT systems in order to determine the sources of evidentiary data appropriate for analysis as well as the techniques the auditor may use in order to obtain, extract, and if necessary, transform such data to facilitate analysis. The downside of this approach is that auditor must be familiar with the tools available in the specific client's IT environment, and use of such tools for audit purposes could cause potential disruption of the auditee's live system with implications for both data integrity and operational performance. This information may be derived from current system documentation where a high-level understanding of the IT processes may be obtained, including a precise understanding of the individual data elements available so that those appropriate for data analysis may be selected. The open database connectivity (ODBC) interface is a Microsoft C programming language interface that makes it possible for applications to access data from a variety of database management systems (DBMSs).
