 In this presentation we will discuss the effect of information technology on internal controls. This is of course a big area and a growing area with regards to businesses, internal controls, and auditing, and it's an area where auditors often have to find help, often need specialists. In other words, the auditor is going to be able to know or want to know what type of audit procedures, what type of internal controls are necessary, for example, a good separation of duties, work with the IT professional in order to see whether or not that separation of duties has been implemented into the database system, often with some kind of separation or restriction to the type of information that can be accessed through a database program. So obviously with larger and larger companies, there's going to be a larger and larger IT requirements, larger restrictions of data, and so certain people are going to have access to certain types of things. And that's going to be one of the huge benefits that you can have. You can have a database program that allows different people to have this different access, one of the benefits that you have. So I noticed when we think about information technology to businesses, a lot of times I get one of two reactions. One is a lot of excitement for the separation of duties that can be taken place and an increase in internal controls and a higher level of safety into some degree. And another with a lot of skepticism in terms of if we don't understand the system that's put together and possibly risk to something like hackers or something to get information that wasn't intended for them to have or possibly internal controls that aren't well designed and the separation doing not being well designed for some reason and therefore having some exposure to information that could be going to the wrong place is one of the major default or one of the major problems with technology. So let's go through some of the benefits pros and cons of technology here with regards to the internal controls. Benefits include consistent application of predefined business rules and performance of complex calculations in processing large volumes of transactions or data. So in other words, when we're thinking of course of large volumes transactions or data, if we could set up a system that they're all going to be the same. In other words, if they follow the same set of rules, a database program can apply those very efficiently over a long period of time, much more efficiently of course than an individual can. So any kind of repetitive work that can be put together with a system of rules is something that's great because the average, the time will be better and of course the consistency will be better as well. Facilitation of data analytics for enhanced internal decision making. So it could provide better analytical procedures, again saving a lot of time with regards to the processing of the analytical procedure, the information. Now I can't make the decision of course, but just putting the information together, put it in those well defined once again types of calculations that it can just take the information from and then generate that information for us in such a way that we can then decide on it is great. Greater timeliness, availability and accuracy of information. So the information is usually going to be able to be put together more quickly with a database type program, more available because we have a lot more ability to get to the database program, especially now considering it might be over the web or something like that, different access type of area for it and accuracy is actually should increase if we use the system well. A system doesn't mean that it's going to be accurate for sure because we could still find ways to have problems, but if we design the system well and we know what the system does well, calculations, then it's going to be accurate with regards to those calculations as long as we put the input in there correctly. Greater ability to monitor the entity's activities, policies and procedures on a timely basis. So once we have stuff into the system, we can do a lot of monitoring systems a lot more easily and that's one great thing about these database systems that we can have that separation of duties. We can have certain people be able to monitor what other people are doing while still restricting whether or not they can change that information that the other person does and that allows for great separation of duty and great ability for supervision techniques to basically happen over that database type of system. Enhanced segregation of duties through security controls, applications, databases and operating systems. So segregation of duties, that's one of the major, major, major internal controls that we're going to have. That's one of our checks and balances. The system will allow us to do that. So we'll be able to say you only have control over this part, you only have control over that part and therefore we'll be able to separate duties. So notice that as a company grows and gets larger, we typically have more internal controls, more separation of duties.