What Is an Audit Trail?

 

 

An audit trail is a date and time-stamped record of the history and details around a transaction, work event, product development step, control execution, or financial ledger entry. Almost any type of work activity or process can be captured in an audit trail, whether automated or manual. Different fields will have audit trails that exist in a variety of forms to capture their unique areas of focus, but the overarching theme and purpose of the audit trail is to track a sequence of events and actions in chronological order. In today’s fast-paced IT and risk environment, viewing an audit trail or audit log in or as close to real-time as possible may be part of an organization’s day-to-day operations.

Specific to the healthcare and medical devices, an audit trail would track access and authentication to a patient’s medical record (typically in an Electronic Health Record or EHR), any updates made, and when that sensitive data was accessed.  In the financial sector, institutions like the SEC and NYSE will use an audit trail to uncover and review detailed information on trades when there are any questions about the accuracy, legality, or validity of trade data. Most information technology systems will also have a detailed audit trail for user activity, and some IT systems are built to aggregate inputs from other systems and create audit trail data from that.

What Are Audit Trails Used For?

Audit trails provide a record of events that are time-stamped and provide data to varying degrees. Some audit trails may only capture errors, and a few simple details, like in the anti-virus example above. Other audit trails are deeply complex, and require some technical expertise to read and process.

A simple example of an audit trail covering a transaction is a grocery store receipt. You enter the store to buy a lemon and walk out with a receipt recording the transaction. It will include what you purchased, the exact time that it happened, and the location where the transaction took place. In a more complex scenario, an audit trail is used to verify the source of funds for a down payment on a home by a mortgage lender. Financial regulators examine complex audit trails from brokerage firms when they want to investigate the suspicious market activity.

Audit trails are valuable evidence used to support audits, access controls, financial statements, investigations, security, and many other functions in an organization. They provide a way to prove the integrity of a transaction or activity, validate an activity, and ensure that key transactions, controls, and actions are being performed.

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