CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Human being, either young, old, literate and illiterate are all product of their various environment i.e. the environment (internal or External) affects them either positively or negatively, even their work and inputs into anything, due to the rational and unpredictable nature of man, that makes them react to stimulants. Before considering, the reaction towards auditing, auditing can be traced back to the ancient times where the receipts and payments of an estate or a manor were read to the lord or proprietor, or the head of a manor. It began more like a stewardship kind of dealings, where houses are entrusted into the hand of caretakers, who report to the landlord at the end of every month, etc. the origin of the word auditing is from a Latin word “Audire” (meaning to hear). At the beginning, the dealing was a kind of a sole – proprietorship business, since it involves a landlord and a steward/caretaker; but with industrial revolution, there was an increase in business transactions, which ushers in partnership, and other forms or types of business.
Hence, financial transactions becomes much and the whole processes becomes complex and required more formal and improved accountability. Considering the issue of audit reaction to the computer environment, it becomes proper to note that prior to the new era (computer) audit had already been in practice, though in a traditional/manual environment, as such, there are bound to be either challenges or prospects in the change to computer environment. This holds to the fact, that human beings react to changes in either positive or negative way, and they constitute the most important resources, in an organizational setup. Over the years human beings had been used to a particular audit environments and it has become part of their routine work; so introduction of a new thing could and could not be a problem, irrespective of its future contribution, but as a result of human level of adoption to new things. Hence, the starting point is how fast or slow, the organizations members of staff adopts to new policies, where this is in place, then the challenges and prospects can now be determined.
1.1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF M-TEL From M–TEL’s NEW IMAGE.
A presentation to new members of the Mtel family October 2003. Mtel was established in 1996, to run the operations of NITEL’S Total Access Communication System (TACS). It was merged with NITEL in April 2001 and demerge on 1st April, 2003. It has the vision of becoming, the number two mobiles operators in Nigeria in both consumer and business markets in five years, and have a reliable state of the art network infrastructure that meets the ever increasing demanding requirements of its customers and support a wide range of mobile voice and data service. Also, that its organization will have a “customer first” culture that is plainly visible by the respectful way it treats its customer and by the utmost care that is taken throughout the organization to maintain the promised service levels. And Mtel is aimed at achieving this vision through the telecommunication services it provides to the general public.
1.2 THE STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The audit problems with organization today can be dealt with from two broad perspective i.e. technological problem and historical problems. This sense of the technical problem has to do with lack of technological know how. Since audit in a computer environment is a modern or contemporary way of audit, it entails a formal or an informal training on how to do this, which so many people (auditors) and their organization lacks, and it also involves extra spending on the purchases, maintenance, etc. of computer and its accessories, which organization try to avoid in their bids to maximize profit. The historical aspect of it could be referred to as familiarity with the traditional way, which result from continuous practice, hence making it difficult for one to adopt to current or modern way of doing it, so easily. Furthermore, the size of the organization, like my case study whose area offices here in Kaduna is small in size and in member of staff, also determine the use of modern audit (Computer) or the traditional (manual) way of doing it, i.e. if the size is big, computer audit will be embarked on to facilitate the whole audit process, while if it is small in size, the traditional way can be used, since the work load in little.
