ACL:
Introduction & Tutorial
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Fraud Data Analysis
 Examples of Fraud tests in ACL:
 Comparing employee addresses with vendor addresses to identify
employees posing as vendors
 Searching for duplicate check numbers to find photocopies of company
checks
 Searching the list of vendors to identify those with post office boxes for
addresses. These can be easily extracted from the vendor file for further
follow-up
 Analyzing the sequence of all transactions to identify missing checks or
invoices
 Identifying all vendors with more than one vendor code or more than one
mailing address
 Finding several vendors with the same mailing address
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Fraud Data Analysis Methodology
Plan your Project
Acquire the Data
Access the Data with ACL
Verify the Integrity of your Data
Analyze the Data
Report your Findings
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What is ACL?
 Tool developed in the 1970s to assist auditors with the testing of large data sets
 Primarily identifies trends and locates errors
 Enables auditors to:
 Efficiently handle large files
 Perform data manipulation
 Provide statistical and quantifiable detail to support audit findings
 Benefits:
 Reduces audit risk
 Handles various file types
 Avoids accidental data modification by using an image
 Processes data quickly and efficiently
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What is ACL?
 Challenges:
 Producing valid output
 Requesting correct data
 Communication between accounting and IT departments
 Why is ACL used?
 Framework that provides powerful analytics on data without manipulation
 Original data will not be altered in ACL
 Allows for simple and thorough documentation
 Keeps a perpetual log of all actions executed!
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Importing Sample Data Set
 On the ACL main page, select “Create a new project”:
 Title the project “ACL_Tutorial” and save to desktop:
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Importing Sample Data Set
 In the “data definition wizard”, select platform as “disk” and search for location of the .txt
file “Transactions_Sample_Data”:
 On the next screen (Select Data), select “PCs and all other types of computers (ASCII)
and click “Next”
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Importing Sample Data
 On the following screen, select “Delimited text file”, click “Next”
 This screen simply verifies the column headers & data types, click “Next”:
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Importing Sample Data
 In the window that displays, rename the file to “Transactions_Sample_Data.fil” and
save to desktop, click “Next”
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Importing Sample Data
 The final screen is for verification, simply click “Finish”:
 Lastly, the current table will be renamed to your data file name,
“Transactions_Sample_Data” automatically, just click “OK”:
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ACL Interface, Basic Commands
 You can now open the data table that you just imported by clicking on it in the
Project Navigator panel (on the left):
 *Use the “ACL 9 Quick Guide” PDF to become acclimated with the
ACL interface as well as run some basic commands on the
Transactions_Sample_Data table.