DailyPost 2250
FORENSIC AUDIT TO DIGITAL FORENSICS
Where different streams knowledge would converge, no one knows. There are innumerable inter- dependencies, but the challenge is who would unravel these linkages and make it functional repository of knowledge, consequent research on it, and making it a part of the practice. That today’s world is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary is not a great proclamation, it is the harsh reality, the earlier it is addressed the better it is. Otherwise, we keep wandering in the academic conundrum, as most of the country is, not knowing where to go. And is getting bad to worse. Who would reclaim us out of this morass? The area of forensic audit and it’s connect could be an eye opener.
The standard practice so meticulously created called statutory audits brought us to a cross road where the most important of the financial lapses, went under the rung, never to come out. That everything is a tick in official and professional life is what we are taught to do. Unravelling reality has never been our concern. Giving insufficient time with reasonably average workforce is recipe for disaster, that what did Statutory Audit did to the companies and the economy. Audit gave a false sense of déjà vu till skeletons came tumbling out, when it could no longer be ignored and thus was born the science, art and commerce of forensic audit.
If companies are to be saved and consequent to it the economy, forensic audit cannot be used as an umbrella when it rains, it needs to become a mainstream practice, for whatever it takes. Otherwise, the scams of day, will never be out. There is forensics in everything in the technological age is a truism. It is getting consolidated by the day. Negating would can turn out to be your nemesis. Undoubtedly, the investigation oriented forensic audit has done yeoman service to the profession, and discerned the third eye of audit and also the tech needed to make it happen. At its core is data.
The domain expertise with the data tools digitally shuffling through the financial documents have to do the magic, in between the reams of paper and might be TBs of data in worst of the cases. As all information & data are digital and hence the gaps, patterns and clues exist in the cracks and crevices of data bases and in digital storge and communication mediums on variety of gadgets, tools and platforms. And finally, the cloud. Digital forensics have come of age in the digital world and that can be treated as a natural outcome. If forensic audit is managing with inferior or crude tools, its high time the two streams of knowledge, expertise, tools and practice need to come together, to take forensic audit to a different level. Digital forensics would get another area to prove its worth.
BREAKING PRACTITIONERS BARRIERS WILL BE THE PRACTICE OF TOMMOROW.
Sanjay Sahay