I’m a high school senior and I’m trying to get some info on college majors (im a bit lost). Some websites reccomend getting a degree in comp sci with a few accounting courses on the side to go into IT auditing. I was wondering if you guys can give me ur opinion on what hte best way is. I applied as an EE major but will probably change. I want to change to math so i was wondering if getting a degree in math with a minor in accounting can get me into IT auditing. what are your thoughts?
Thanks
I currently work as an IT Auditor with a big firm. Most of the people I work with have either accounting or information technology degrees (I actually have both). Computer science should be good as well; I am not aware of any math majors on the job but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. One major employer of IT Audit are CPA/professional services firms, since IT Auditors are often used to support financial statement audits as required by law. There are also opportunities working directly for companies or government agencies as well.
@DmitriR alright. thanks for the advice.Do you think you can tell me more specifically what you guys do that seperates you from regular accountants/auditors?
The main thing that IT audit does is evaluate the computer-related internal controls of companies. (Internal controls is just a generic term for anything that a company or agency has to protect itself in some way.) Regular accountants have to evaluate internal controls in general but many of them don’t have a lot of technical experience with computers or information systems so they have IT auditors as support.
You don’t necessarily have to be working on the financial statement audits though. IT Audit is pretty versatile and people in that role end up working on engagements completely unrelated to traditional accounting, supporting private companies, government agencies, the military, etc.
One of the more interesting things that we sometimes get assigned to do as a project is penetration testing, which is when we play the role of enemy hackers and try to break into the computer systems of the target to see if we can find any weaknesses. It’s something that companies used to not want to do because it’s expensive and risky but it’s becoming more and more common because of all of the recent hacks at places like Target and Sony that have happened recently.
The thing about auditing (and public accounting as well) is that you’re not really limited to any specific work areas. A client can hire you to do basically anything these days, so you could probably ask that same question to five different people and get at least somewhat different answers.
@DmitriR thank you very much! i took accounting 1A (the intro acct course) at community college this summer and did really well. i remember the teacher talked about IT auditors working on internal controls a bit, but im glad i got the chance to get a personal account.
regards