David Crotts receives prestigious international audit award
David Crotts, senior auditor at Virginia Tech, has received the international Most Promising Novice ACL Impact Award.
The award is presented to an ACL user who has been using the technology for less than two years and demonstrated an increase in the quality of audits and in the detection of errors, inefficiencies, and fraud. ACL Services, the award sponsor, is a provider of audit specific data analytic software and utilized by the university in Internal Audit.
Crotts is the first recipient in the history of the award to come from the United States. In addition to the being recognized as the Most Promising Novice, Crotts also was awarded the professional designation of Certified Data Analyst and invited to an international conference.
One of Internal Audit’s strategic initiatives is to develop a continuous monitoring process to test for inconsistencies, duplication, errors, policy violations, missing approvals, incomplete data, dollar or volume limit errors, or other possible breakdowns in internal controls. Crotts led this project and used ACL to automate the first two areas, fixed assets and procurement cards, of Internal Audit’s new continuous monitoring program.
The continuous monitoring initiative will eventually expand to focus on additional areas. The use of audit data analytics to examine large populations of data sets provides the ability to gain far more insight into errors non-compliance issues, and fraud than the traditional sampling approach.
In addition to his work in continuous monitoring, Crotts also developed ACL scripts to fully automate security testing of UNIX servers. This allowed for easier synthesis of tens of thousands of records related to the configuration of these devices. Because of his work in these two areas, he has presented at last year’s College of University Auditors of Virginia Conference and will be a presenter at this year’s national Association of College and University Auditors Annual Conference on these topics.
As senior auditor at Virginia Tech, Crotts performs operational and information technology risk-based audit as well as advisory service projects throughout the university.
Crotts received his bachelor’s degree in accounting and information systems from Virginia Tech.
Dedicated to its motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), Virginia Tech takes a hands-on, engaging approach to education, preparing scholars to be leaders in their fields and communities. As the commonwealth’s most comprehensive university and its leading research institution, Virginia Tech offers 240 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 31,000 students and manages a research portfolio of $513 million. The university fulfills its land-grant mission of transforming knowledge to practice through technological leadership and by fueling economic growth and job creation locally, regionally, and across Virginia.
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