COBIT 5 Sample Audit Checklist

COBIT is utilized by major organizations with primary responsibilities related to business processes and related technologies, providing an accessible method for measuring maturity and capability of individual processes while strengthening interrelationships between them and improving interrelationships with others. COBIT also assists organizations in assigning responsibilities, monitoring performance measures and agreeing upon common goals.

COBIT is designed to complement IT governance processes and audit. Use LogicManager’s COBIT compliance checklists and automation to enhance IT auditing practices.

Risk Assessment
IT risk management is vital for ensuring regulatory compliance, meeting long-term goals and mitigating direct IT threats such as data breaches, malware installations, privilege abuse or phishing attacks – yet many organizations lack sufficient resources dedicated to risk management resulting in costly IT losses and lost competitive advantages.

COBIT 5 provides an IT governance risk assessment framework. This framework serves as a structure for identifying, evaluating and managing all types of IT-related risks as well as key supporting processes that help organizations meet their IT-related business goals.

Employing this framework can assist your organization in assessing the level of risk in its IT systems, making strategic decisions regarding security controls to invest in, as well as creating an action plan to manage that risk and mitigate any issues, for instance assessing impactful services or upgrades by means of this questionnaire.

Internal Control Assessment
Internal control assessment is an integral component of any comprehensive risk management program, helping organizations identify risks, evaluate current internal control mechanisms and enhance overall organizational performance. Furthermore, conducting an internal control evaluation provides valuable insight into a companyaEUR(tm)s processes as well as pinpointing any areas requiring improvement that external auditors might uncover.

Internal Control Assessment involves identifying processes and their associated risks, reviewing existing mitigating controls, assessing their effectiveness in reducing risks to an acceptable level and documenting results.

IS auditors should work with stakeholders to confirm draft narratives and flowcharts before meeting with them to ensure all pertinent issues are covered in their engagements. An IS auditor might, for instance, ask how staff members enter passwords into TALLY system, whether this process links back to staff profiles etc.

External Control Assessment
Audit teams use surveys and checklists during the fieldwork phase to help business teams self-evaluate their processes, using results to establish residual risk and maturity level ratings.

These ratings can help identify different forms of risk (fraud, operational, security). Furthermore, they can help identify compensating controls. Assessment should take into account whether they are manual or automated controls and whether external events could impact them negatively.

Integrating COBIT 5 into your IT governance framework enables you to ensure regulatory compliance, foster long-term goal achievement and better manage risk. However, aligning yourself with this framework is time consuming without intelligent software such as LogicManager’s One-Click Compliance AI that quickly scans through existing IT controls, policies and procedures and suggests which ones would be effective at testing against COBIT 5, thus cutting internal labor costs for compliance management and increasing internal employee efficiency.

Financial Control Assessment
The COBIT 5 framework facilitates the integration of governance and management frameworks. It includes an approach for mapping practices and activities against third-party references, providing IT assurance professionals with an overall view of an enterprise. In addition, its focus lies on process inputs/outputs which support key decisions as well as provide an audit trail record.

An unstable control environment can have significant adverse repercussions for business applications and the information they contain, creating havoc for IS auditors who must assess risk assessments. Such weaknesses could arise either due to inherent risks or from control deficiencies.

An instance where this occurs would be when a banking clerk steals cash or checkbook entries, writes their own cheque from customer accounts, or writes fraudulent checks from customer accounts to themselves – both scenarios will erode data integrity for business applications.

An IT auditor must identify these risks to ascertain the degree of trust they can place in a system, performing a detailed examination of all business applications’ controls.