Tuesday March 27th 2007

Study of Programming Errors

On Thursday March 29th, Dr. Ebrahimi will be meeting with each student to go over your progress on your project and the midterm.

You must have the midterm and your tutorial ready to be reviewed by Thursday.

We started the class out with a lecture form Old Westbury Alumnus Scott Bell.

Scott is an Information Technology Auditor for PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Sarbanes Oxley- A law that requires the auditing and testing of financial controls within in a business at regular intervals.

Scott audits the internal controls (as they relate to software and technology) in many major entertainment companies.

One of his main clients is ESPN. ESPN uses a computer system for accounting and many of their primary business procedures.

For instance, one of the ESPN controls is the use of an automated report that ensures the commercials that have been sold are run accordingly.   Accounting receives the report and a team of quality assurance professionals watch television to make sure that commercial actual run.

Scott makes sure that there are information technology controls in place to ensure that the risk of fraud (whether internal or external) is lessened.

How did Old Westbury help Scott become ready for his career as an auditor?

C++ class allowed Scott to become familiar with the syntax and aspects of programming- he can read the code to make sure it is not violating a control.

The Systems design class allowed him to be able to make sure that systems and applications accessed only the resources they needed to and did not allow access to unnecessary data.

In addition to to his education at Old Westbury Scott also obtained an industry credential for Information Security Auditors.

For more information on Information Systems Auditor certification go to.

http://www.isaca.org/

Scott suggested researching companies before you go on an interview.

Make your resume detailed and include experiences and classes taken outside of standard classroom education.

After we come back from spring break we will have a quiz.  The quiz will include questions from the paper above as well as items discussed in class.