ADA - Audit Data Analytics Data Acquisition and Preparation Questions and Answers

Question 1

An auditor is preparing to analyze a client's sales data for the entire fiscal year.
The data is extracted from two different systems: the primary ERP and a legacy billing system.
During the data preparation phase, the auditor notices that the date format from the ERP is 'YYYY-MM-DD', while the legacy system uses 'MM/DD/YYYY'.
Which data preparation technique is MOST critical to apply first to ensure the data can be merged and analyzed chronologically?

Accepted Answer

Data normalization

Answer

Data deduplication

Answer

Outlier detection

Answer

Data sampling

Question 2

Which of the following is a primary goal of the 'Transform' stage in the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process when used for audit data analytics?

Accepted Answer

Applying business rules to cleanse, standardize, and structure the data for analysis.

Answer

Loading the raw data directly into the analytics tool for initial assessment.

Answer

Connecting directly to the source systems to obtain the required datasets.

Answer

Archiving the final results and audit evidence in a secure repository.

Question 3

During data acquisition for an audit, an auditor receives a large dataset of journal entries. To ensure the integrity of the data before performing analysis, which of the following validation checks would be most effective?

Accepted Answer

Comparing the total number of records received to a control count from the source system.

Answer

Performing a Benford's Law analysis on the transaction amounts.

Answer

Identifying the top 10 largest transactions by value.

Answer

Joining the data with the employee master file to look for unauthorized users.

Question 4

An internal auditor is analyzing expense reports and identifies several duplicate records where the same employee, amount, and date are present, but with slightly different descriptions (e.g., 'Lunch with client' vs. 'Client lunch'). This is an example of what common data quality issue?

Accepted Answer

Duplicate data

Answer

Incomplete data

Answer

Inaccurate data

Answer

Inconsistent data

Question 5

When planning an audit data analytics procedure, which of the following is a critical first step in the data acquisition process?

Accepted Answer

Gaining a thorough understanding of the data sources and relevant data dictionary.

Answer

Immediately cleansing and normalizing all available tables.

Answer

Selecting the appropriate visualization tools for the final report.

Answer

Performing preliminary analytical procedures on a sample of the data.

Question 6

An auditor uses a data profiling tool during the initial data preparation phase. What is the primary purpose of this activity?

Accepted Answer

To summarize the data's characteristics and assess its quality.

Answer

To predict future trends and potential anomalies.

Answer

To build a machine learning model for fraud detection.

Answer

To load the transformed data into a data warehouse.