INFORMATION SYSTEMS AUDIT FRAMEWORK TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF AUDIT IN HIGHER EDUCATION IN EAST AFRICA

Abstract

There are some similarities between Financial Statement Audit (FSA) and Information System Audit (ISA). FSA is an examination of the reliability and integrity of financial statement records whereas ISA is a review and evaluation of the controls, risks, and system development within an Information system infrastructure to determine if the information systems are safeguards to protect against abuse, safeguards assets, maintains data integrity, and operates effectively to achieve the organization's going concern objective. Decision makers need to ensure that the process of collecting and evaluating evidence of an organization's information systems, practices, and operations are reliable. Data manipulation can be caused by external or internal threat. Internal manipulation threat is the most dangerous one because it is committed by authorized personnel which make it very difficult to be detected. In particular, the framework introduces an anomaly detection technique, one of the data mining methods, to determine the suspected transactions arise from both internal and external threat. Once the suspected transactions are identified, procedures and monitoring control will be in place to minimize each threat. The proposed framework is expected to help both universities and ministry of higher education managers at all levels to make a vital decision based on reliable and accurate information in East Africa.