TO THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
DR. J.E. BORITZ, FCPA, FCA, CISA
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
After another challenging year, I am pleased to present this report on the operations and activities of the UWCISA during 2023, our twenty-sixth year of operation.
This year marks the second year in a renewed three-year plan approved by UWCISA’s sponsors for the period 2022–2024, inclusive. Last year, we reorganized the Centre into focus areas headed by four Associate Directors. The focus areas and their leaders are Assurance Services (Tim Bauer); Cybersecurity & AIS (Alec Cram); Data Analytics and Emerging Technologies (Theo Stratopoulos); and Internal Audit and ESG Assurance (Adam Vitalis). During the year we have been growing into this new organization and this report reflects some of the changes that have resulted. During this year we also experienced some changes in Board membership, bidding farewell to Bob Cuthbertson, our non-executive chair, and Greg Shields, one of our members at large. We are grateful to Bob and Greg for their years of service to UWCISA. We also welcomed Frank Yam to his new role as the chair of our Board.
During the year, we fulfilled our thought leadership role through members’ service on various boards and advisory groups including the Auditing and Assurance Standards Board’s (AASB) Audit Evidence Advisory Group, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) Trust Services Information Integrity and Cybersecurity Task Forces, and CPA Canada’s Audit Data Analytics Committee, Technology Advisory Committee, and Audit and Assurance Technology Committee. Members of the Centre also serve on several editorial boards of academic journals, including Accounting Perspectives (AP). Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory (AJPT), Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR), Current Issues in Auditing (CIIA), International Journal of Accounting Information Systems (IJAIS), Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting (JETA) and Journal of Information Systems (JIS).
We continued work on major projects on assurance innovation and internal audit competencies and continued our research activities on a variety of other projects which have resulted in publications in high quality journals, and we have also presented our research at a number of academic and practitioner conferences, as detailed in this report. Our work in progress includes a variety of interesting projects addressing key topics in the broad field of assurance, information systems, and information integrity.
In the fall, we held our 13th Biennial Research Symposium on Information Integrity and Information Systems Assurance using a hybrid format which attracted both in-person and online participants from around the globe. Selected papers from the Symposium will be published in a special issue of the IJAIS in the coming year. The complete program is included in this report. We have also started planning for our 14th Biennial Research Symposium, to be held in the fall of 2025.
This year we offered very successful virtual professional development (PD) sessions on Alteryx, Power BI, SQL and Explainable AI. During the fourth quarter, we launched a pilot test of a new initiative – Coffee Break PDTM – which offers inexpensive “gulp-sized” PD opportunities on topics of interest to practitioners.
We continue to work with other Centres with similar purposes such as the one at Rutgers University, strengthening an international network for mutual support of our respective missions. We are members of the University of Waterloo’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI) and Waterloo.AI. We also expanded our relationship with the Institute of Internal Auditors Canada (IIA Canada).
We welcome new partners to share in our mission. I thank UWCISA’s Board members and sponsors for their continued support and look forward to another productive year.