Risk Advisory Consultant Intern
- Ernst and Young is an international accounting firm in the “Big 4”. With over 250,000 employees worldwide, and thousands of locations. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work in the Philadelphia office in the Risk Advisory program.
- My role as a Risk Advisory Intern was to help support my engagement teams during the IT control auditing of our clients. I sat in on client meetings with individuals from IT Help Desk workers to C-Suite executives. I worked on collecting evidence, writing narratives, and testing the companies IT controls to help create a significant level of comfort as to if the IT controls were working as designed.
- During my 8-weeks with the firm I worked on two different engagement teams for two different clients. These engagements were at two very different points in their audit and helping me gain a better grasp of the overall process of an IT audit. On my first client I worked on creating year-end matrices to help layout the controls and organize what evidence we had, who gave it us, descriptions of the controls, etc. I also got to work on SOCR reports which essentially a report on the controls of the client which effect financial reports. On my second engagement we were in the beginning phases of the Audit so we were heavily involved in meetings where we gathered evidence. Often I was the one responsible for sifting through the evidence to find out what was relevant. I even discovered a failed control where users who were terminated still had access to the system. I would then turn these documented pieces of evidence into a narrative for how the control is designed and how we went about testing them.
- During the course of my internship I learned a lot of things about how to more effectively communicate, how I work in teams, what I like in a work experience and a whole lot about IT auditing. In relation to the MIS program, the courses I took in the department were unbelievably helpful. For example Data analytics taught me how to read SQL script that I had to often look over in the evidence I reviewed for clients. IT enterprise was valuable because it helped me better understand how enterprise systems all come to together so I could have a better idea of how all the systems that I was auditing were coming together. Digital solutions was a great prep class because I gained experience on how to interview clients, prepare questions, and scope out the project. In addition to all the great MIS classes, Fox offered other classes that came in great help such as business communications and excel for business.