THE AUDITING skills of staff at the Auditor General’s office are now significantly enhanced, thanks to a training course in the use of a state-of-the-art auditing tool designed to perform a series of accounting  tasks.

The presentation ceremony which saw 120 persons graduating from CaseWare IDEA and Risk Based Auditing was held in the Boardroom of the Audit Office, High Street, Kingston.
The training is part of the Organisation’s efforts to modernise services, and training programmes. It also features components which will revolutionalise audits conducted by the office, while helping to enhance fraud detection performance, lowering the cost of analysis and timely submission of audit reports.
Auditor General (AG), Deodat Sharma said that the training programme which is to present certificates for the IDEA programme is another stepping stone for the Audit office; noting that it will significantly assist in the handling of works on a more professional basis.
“These are the tools; it’s like if you are going to build a house you would need carpenter with all his tools and so Steve Luciani has provided us with all the right tools, while Peter Carlill is here providing us with the way forward, which will surely enhance our work load giving us better results,” Sharma added.

IDEA products have the capacity to read, display, analyze, manipulate, and extract data files from any source including reports printed to a file. It has depth and productivity to audit and help users meet requirements; with regards to fraud, risk and internal control.
It is used in 16 languages in over 90 countries, by major accounting firms, federal, state and Government agencies.
The training course which was conducted from August 9 to 13 and 16 to 20 was sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
It was conducted by Steven Luciani an instructor from Canada , with 10 years experience using software in external audit and fraud detection and Peter Carlill who previously worked as an Audit Manager with the National Audit Office in the United Kingdom.