My teams and I completed thousands of audits over the years, But several stand out in my memory.
1. A pre-implementation controls review for the Tosco Marketing Company.
The company decided to replace not only the in-store systems for its >6,000 Circle K convenience stores and ’76 gas stations, but also its centralized stores accounting system.
Management selected a system that had only been used in fashion retail stores in a shopping mall and a central system that had never handled the volume of transactions a massive convenience store system would throw at it, let alone worked with this in-store system.
My team (two IT audit managers and a financial/operational audit manager) reported to the senior management steering committee that the company had not been able to test the full system at anything like the expected volume of transactions. They said that the system was highly likely to fail.
When the steering committee decided that the best option was to take the risk instead of delaying the go-live date so testing capability could be added, my team of heroes did the impossible.
They identified the several points at which the new software would fail and management was able to put triage teams in place. The system failed exactly where the team had predicted but the swift actions by the…
