Business Finance Homework Help

You work as an internal auditor for Oklahoma State University (OSU). You were asked to perform an audit of the purchasing cards (P-cards) that are used on campus. P-cards are a business credit card that some employees are permitted to use to purchase necessary goods and services. If employees agree to certain rules, they can then use a P-card to make appropriate business purchases rather than using their own credit card. This allows the employee to avoid spending personal funds and seeking reimbursement.It also provides the business with greater control because the business can institute internal controls to limit types of purchases and avoid inefficient and fraudulent transactions. Organizations also can track spending using detailed P-card records provided by the credit card companies.

You have been assigned the task of auditing all of OSU’s P-card transactions for 2014. To perform this audit, you received a file of all P-card transactions for the entire state of Oklahoma (the state collects all transactions for state and higher education institutions).^[1] This file will be described more in Part II.

The purpose of this case is to help develop your analytical mindset. An analytics mindset is the ability to:

• Ask the right questions
• Extract, transform and load (ETL) relevant data
• Apply appropriate data analytics techniques
• Interpret and share the results with stakeholders

For this case, you will perform the following tasks, as assigned by your professor. Each task focuses on a different part of developing an analytics mindset.

• Task 1 – Gain an understanding of OSU P-card guidelines and internal controls. Start generating questions that would evaluate employee compliance with internal controls and guidelines and that would test organizational costs and benefits of using P-cards.
• Task 2 – Gain an understanding of the data used for testing.
• Task 3 – Transform the data and load it into the appropriate tool for analysis.
• Task 4 – Review or learn basic querying techniques.
• Task 5 – Perform a test of various P-card internal controls.
• Task 6 – Develop an audit tool to search for possible noncompliant purchases.

Task 7 – Perform forensic tests of transactions to look for fraudulent transactions

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^[1] The data for this case comes from the Purchase Card (P-card) Fiscal Year 2015 database and is made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/. Any rights to individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/. The data for this case is made publicly available at https://data.ok.gov/dataset/purchase-card-pcard-fiscal-year-2015. Do not use the data set posted on the web. Use the one included by your professor because some of the transactions may have been changed or updated. Also, some data may have been altered, added or deleted to enhance learning objectives and, thus, you should not use the data to infer good or malicious intent by anyone listed in the data set.