NWT Engineering Ltd. is a large consulting engineering firm based in Edmonton, Alberta. It provides services in many areas including mining exploration, environmental management, transportation, water and sewage, civil engineering, waste management, contaminant disposal, and electrical engineering. Each area of specialization is the responsibility of a divisional vice president who operates relatively autonomously of all other areas. Corporate services and accounting, however, come under the control of a single vice president. Although divisions can maintain their own accounting systems, they still must provide data in a standardized form for input to corporate accounting systems.

Your firm has just been appointed as the external auditors for NWT Engineering. You are the partner in charge of the audit, and you are currently planning interim audit work you wish to undertake. In this light you commence to plan the audit of systems development controls in the hope that you can reduce the extent of substantive year-end work.

During an interview with the vice president, corporate services and accounting, you ask about the structure of systems development services within the company. You are told no centralized systems development group exists. Indeed, no centralized information systems facility exists. Although the company once had a centralized data processing facility, in due course it was closed down. Responsibility for information systems was then divested to the individual divisional vice presidents. This arrangement has proved to be very successful. Each division typically now has a local area network of workstations connected to a minicomputer that acts as a server. These divisional minicomputers usually can communicate with one another. Each division also has systems development staff who assist divisional staff with the design, implementation, and operation of information systems within the division. Although systems development staff within the different divisions occasionally meet with one another, primarily they act autonomously. Many end users within the divisions also undertake their own systems development work using high-level design and programming tools that their divisions have purchased or leased.

Required. In light of the information provided to you by the vice president, corporate services and accounting, outline how you plan to approach the audit of systems development controls within NWT Engineering Ltd.