Joe Termine is an auditor who lives outside of sunny Princeton, NJ. He has been an auditor for nearly 7 years – a job which has taken him to 23 countries, 41 U.S. states, and 83 Marriotts. The job has enabled him to work in four types of organization: a large retailer, a multinational conglomerate company, a public accounting firm, and a public school system. Prior to his life as an auditor, Joe worked as an I.T. systems administrator.
Joe Termine has a passion for researching technology and its role in governance and public policy. He believes that auditors should embrace today’s technology to enable them to reduce their workload and extend their ability to oversee conditions that can cause inefficiencies, lost opportunities, and damage to internal control and reputation. This has led Joe to pursue several research projects on the subject of improving audit efficiency and coverage. He’s developed a proof of concept called the AOT – Audit Organization of Tomorrow – an audit group that uses new technology to promotes auditors’ effectiveness and value. This has led him to evaluate how an AOT might use customer relationship management (CRM) software (e.g. Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM) to manage audit progress, client status, and audit deficiency tracking. He’s also exploring new methods to leverage mobile technology as a research tool and is especially excited about the prospect of new iPhone applications to help auditors expedite audit reporting. Joe has also been learning to use software-based business rules engines (e.g. jBOSS, XBRE) to automate enterprise risk assessment. Finally, Joe is currently researching how Cloud Computing can be used to distribute the management of audit information in a productive way.
Joe maintains a demeanor not typical of most auditors: he considers auditors to be “therapists”, not “investigators”, and strives to open the channels of communication when ambiguity or uncertainty prevails. Where possible, Joe uses automated testing to reduce the drain clients experience when undergoing an audit. He implements processes that incorporate continuous controls monitoring (CCM) to help certain clients reduce the need or frequency of full audits. Finally, Joe is a proponent of audit work paper optimization and is especially committed to standardizing the data structure of work papers and making them easy to manage and change. He studies the way XML and the upcoming Microsoft Oslo framework can be used to achieve this. He believes that work paper standardization is essential to promoting continuous controls monitoring because no value can be gained from an automated audit test unless the audit test’s documentation generates itself.
While not globetrotting or researching audit technology, Joe spends time in NYC at the theatre, plays the piano, and irons his extensive collection of sweater vests.
