IT Audit and Control

Running head: IT AUDIT AND CONTROL
IT AUDIT AND CONTROL
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author note

1IT AUDIT AND CONTROL
The paper will be summarizing the annual Information Systems Audit Report. The
content of the report provides the results of the annual cycle related to the information
systems audits of the year 2018. The report also includes some of the application reviews
from the report of the last year. Important findings as well as recommendations that address
the weaknesses of the common system have also been included in the report. Applications
refer to the software programs that enhance key business processes of an organization that
includes finance, case management, billing, licensing and human resources (Senft, Gallegos
and Davis 2016). The applications facilitate some of the specialist functions as well. These
specialist functions are essential as well as unique to individual entities. The article reviews
some of the primary applications of business that are there various state government entities.
Each of the applications is important to entity operations and also has a significant effect on
the stakeholders that include the public. The report considers four such applications that are:
1) Recruitment Advertisement Management System of Public Sector Commission
2) Advanced Metering Infrastructure of Horizon Power
3) Pensioner Rebate Scheme and Exchange of Office of State Revenue
4) New Land Register of Western Australian Land Information Authority
The review of the various application lay stress on organized processing as well as handling
of data in the below given categories:
a) Policies and procedures
b) Data input
c) Data output
d) Segregation of duties

2IT AUDIT AND CONTROL
e) Security of sensitive information
f) Backup and recovery
g) Audit trail
h) Masterfile maintenance
The test done highlights the weaknesses in the control design of the applications that are
responsible to increase the risk of data or information to mishandle (Chou 2015). The report
suggests that the majority of the issues found were simple as well as inexpensive to resolve.
The entities of Western Australian government make use of Recruitment Management
System (RAMS) in order to maintain the recruitment process of its staffs as well as to record
other severance details. Public make use of this system to apply for the government jobs
there. As per the report the system is hosted by external means and a third party vendor
manages it in a SaaS arrangement that is Software as a Service (Dzuranin and Mălăescu
2015). The system contains sensitive informations that include names, work history, bank
details, addresses and tax file numbers. As per the report RAMS has been successful in
facilitating significant number of the recruitment processes since its implementation in the
year 2003. Still there are some opportunities of improvement in the application. The Public
Sector Commission has not been assured that the information stored in RAMS will be safe
and confidential. The Commission is unable to demonstrate the monitoring as well as
managing vendor compliance of RAMS as per the requirement of service level agreement.
The risk involved here is that inappropriate business continuity plan could encounter an
outage that could have serious impacts on the activities related to recruitment across Western
Australian government (Han, Rezaee, Xue and Zhang 2015). Poorly managed user access can
expose sensitive data to cyber criminals who can misuse these for their own benefit. RAMS