Data Science in Audit - Payroll Audit

Work paper to test reasonablness of Bonus payment compare to Salary and any indication of fraud.

by Rizwan Ahmed Surhio
Experienced Auditor with Data Analytics SkillsFollow 37

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Description
Testing entire payroll is practically impossible for auditors. This working paper will provide an opportunity for the auditors to visualize entire payroll i.e. salary vs bonuses in one graph to find outliers.

The issues this working paper could highlight is where employees receiving large bonuses compare to their salaries, that means benefiting certain employees with large bonus payments rather than having a uniform or bona fide bonus policy.

Further, this tool could be used in other areas such as
. Salary vs Overtime
. Finding employees that do not exist but receiving salaries etc. this could be achieved by comparing salary with attendance records/ number of time sheets for a period or system log in record compared to salary. The outliers would be no time sheet or no PC log in the period, but salary received.

The example used in explanatory video is real life example of Enron energy with real payroll data.

The aim of this series is to provide ready to use analytical working paper libraries to auditors and risk professionals to add value and improve audit quality. This would increase their level of comfort on providing opinion on financial statements numbers with incurring much additional time and effort.

Feel free to let me know if you have any queries.

This Best Practice includes
1 Python Script and 1 Excel Data File as an example and 1 png image file