IT Audit Specialist

Location:

London or Newcastle offices. Our ways of working include a mix of time at your assigned office, time at client sites across the UK as required and working from home. We have a minimum requirement of attending in person for 2 days a week at NAO or client offices, increasing during busier periods.

Salary:
Starting: £69,017 p.a. (London) or £61,967 p.a. (Newcastle) plus Civil Service Pension. A higher base salary may be available for an exceptional candidate.

The National Audit Office (NAO) supports parliament to hold government to account and to improve public services. We focus on driving long‑term sustainable improvement in public service delivery and work with government and our stakeholders to deliver better performance. In a nutshell, we help the nation spend wisely.

The clients of the NAO are investing in IT systems to address the challenges they face in fulfilling their role. This includes investing in new finance systems and related support systems. These investments mean that, increasingly, the NAO’s financial audits are relying on automated controls / IT dependent manual controls and supporting IT general controls, necessitating increased requirements for IT Audit to support the NAO’s audits of financial statements.

The IT Audit specialist will be joining an IT audit team of 21 including other IT Audit Specialists, IT Audit Managers and Trainees to deliver work across multiple clients covering all areas of the NAO’s financial audit client base.

The team is led by an IT Audit Director and five IT Senior Audit Managers.

We require an experienced IT Audit Specialist capable of supporting financial audit teams and IT Audit Managers to scope, plan and perform the hands‑on delivery of all end‑to‑end IT audit work required for a client, including testing automated and supporting General IT Controls.

We also require the candidate to be involved in other internal aspects of our IT audit practice work, including the development of practice material e.g. work programmes, guidance material etc.

Given the likely engagements on which they will work, it would be helpful for the candidate to have experience in some or all of the following areas:

• SAP finance systems (including ECC and S/4 HANA)
• Oracle finance systems (including eBS and Fusion)
• Active Directory
• System migrations

On non‑client work:

• The candidate must have the skills and experience to be able to move from a client‑focused IT audit testing role to an internal material development role.
• As the candidate will be engaging directly with and producing client‑facing and internal‑facing written material, they must have strong verbal communication and report writing skills.

The preferred candidate is likely to be an experienced Senior Consultant or equivalent, with experience of IT audit work, close to promotion to a managerial role, and is capable of working independently and taking ownership of the day to day delivery of all end‑to‑end IT audit work.

Key responsibilities will be supporting the IT Senior Audit Managers and IT Audit Managers in the scoping, planning and delivery of the annual programme of IT audit work. Depending on the level of experience of the candidate, some management of specific IT audit engagements may be required.

Delivery of specific IT audit engagements

• Use your technical knowledge and understanding of the NAO’s financial audit methodology to:
  • Guide Financial Audit (FA) teams in responding to IT related risks to their audit; and
  • Support the production of an appropriately detailed IT audit response to address the risks identified for relevant technology layers.
• Possess technical knowledge and experience of how to audit IT application and supporting general IT controls in one or more of the following areas at relevant technology layers:
  Oracle EBS, Oracle Fusion, SAP ECC, SAP S/4 Hana or Unix systems. Knowledge of auditing Active Directory and cloud‑based systems would be favourable but not essential.
• IT audit technical knowledge and experience of obtaining assurance over the effective operation of IT controls / functions, interfaces, reports (e.g. SQL), segregation of duties,…