Dear Colleagues,
Due to COVID-19 Pandemic, like all other sectors, public sector auditing has also been affected. Audit schedules of all the Supreme Audit Institutions around the globe have been affected. The SAIs are not in position to commence their audits in their usual traditional ways. They are forced to find a new way (perhaps new normal). In this context, "Remote Audit" is seen as a solution to cope with this situation. This technique will relief SAIs' burden to some extent enabling them to conduct audits remotely though there are several challenges to ripen fully the benefits of "Remote Audit" techniques specially the SAIs in under developed/ developing countries. Manual book keeping and low level of use of ICT is one of the biggest challenges along with the lack of adequate capacity and logistics in SAIs. Further, it will pose new risks to auditee and the auditor, namely the security of information in particularly.
Anyway, later or sooner, we need to conduct audits in virtual environment using ICT. Audit should go faceless. In this journey, "Remote audit" could be a future "New Normal" for SAIs.
Thank you all.
