Audit Function Transformed – A Strong Foundation for Resilience

Banking industry has traditionally visualized audit as a profession driven by extensive interaction between accounting stakeholders, documented evidence based verification and validation and a lot of office desk driven activities.With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the profession now encounters a titanic challenge in the way businesses is to be done and would be done going forward.Apropos to note, the timing of the pandemic closures happened at a time when banking organisations (specially in geographies who follow Jan to Dec or Apr to Mar accounting cycle or accounting cycle overlapping to the pandemic window) are at the cusp of finalizing their accounting books and hence peak season for work.In this back-drop, authors (joint authors from Tata Consultancy Services) on this paper this paper enlists to highlight some of the points for consideration by auditors in conducting their audit in this unique accounting season, as also lay down a set of perspectives for consideration for the profession to be better prepared to address similar insurmountable scenario(s) in the future