Are you using GIS in your audits? Recently, I've been hearing from more and more people who are either using GIS regularly for audits or beginning to explore using GIS as an audit tool. I thought this article was particularly appropriate for the Quarterly theme of "the art and science of auditing" since maps are a form of art (at least to me) and by most definitions geography is a science.
A Quick GIS Primer
GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems. There are several definitions of GIS, but basically GIS is a combination of hardware, software, and data that allows for storage and analysis of geographic data. The power of GIS comes from the ability to relate different information in a spatial context. For example, you can use GIS software to look at where senior citizens are concentrated in a city and compare that to where senior centers are located.
GIS Data
Today, most local governments have and maintain GIS data related to their jurisdiction. Just doing a Google search for "cities GIS data", the first page of results yields links to GIS data for Chicago, Washington DC, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Honolulu, even a repository for GIS data for cities in North Carolina. Many of these pages allow you to link directly to a site where you can download GIS data sets.
Because GIS is often used for emergency routing, most cities have and maintain GIS data for their street network. In addition to street network data, most cities maintain a variety of GIS data for day to day operations. For example, in Austin we have GIS data that represents our streets, bodies of water, watersheds, pipelines, power lines, water quality projects, trash & recycling routes, property parcels, and much, much more. 
Using GIS in Audits
There are several ways you can use GIS as an audit tool (the science). They include:
Checking location-based fees or taxes
In my opinion, the most useful GIS data for an audit is a GIS data file of the streets in your region. This data can be used for plotting addresses (called "geocoding"), which is a great way to check that you are getting all of your location-based fees or taxes such as franchise fees, sales tax, or property tax. If your city or county doesn't have GIS file for your street network, there are actually other places to get one.
The U.S. Census Bureau maintains a nationwide database of streets (as well as railroads, rivers, lakes, and census boundaries), and several private companies actually sell street data for various locations.
Pre-GIS if you were doing a franchise fee audit, you might take a sample of customers from a particular area (like a newly annexed area) and check to make sure that those customers were being charged the correct franchise fee and that the correct franchise fee was then being paid to your entity. Now, with GIS software, you can geocode all of a franchisee's records for the region and check to make sure that all of the records within the entity's boundaries are being charged correctly and remitted. Even if you can't match 100% of your records, you will certainly be able to provide more assurance than with the sampling method.
Over the last several years we have used GIS software to check to see that we were getting sales tax from the State for all businesses with the city limits, verify that sales and property tax were being promptly remitted for newly annexed areas, and check the remittance of franchise fee from a gas utility company. In all of these audits we identified exceptions that either yielded additional revenue to the City or allowed the City to tighten controls to ensure that all future revenue is collected.
Checking service provision Since local governments are usually responsible for a known geographic area, GIS can also be used to check service provision within that area. You can check to make sure you are serving all the citizens within a geographic area, or conversely (since local government resources are scarce) you can check to make sure that you are only serving citizens that are actually within your boundaries. For example, we used GIS to check to see if our Watershed Protection department was servicing only those water quality ponds located within Austin's city limits.
Analyzing geographic data GIS provides an opportunity for auditors to do spatial analysis. Spatial analysis allows you to relate datasets that would be difficult to relate without GIS. For example, with GIS, you can identify all City facilities that lie within a floodplain. Without GIS, this analysis would be manual and time consuming. You would have to figure out the location of all the City facilities, the boundaries of all the floodplain areas, and the relationship between the two. With GIS software, data, and a simple query, you only need a few minutes to answer the same question. You can also use GIS to answer other analysis questions like "how far away were this year's worst fires from working fire hydrants?", "were all commercial buildings built in the last year built on commercially zoned lots?", or "are all affordable housing properties within a mile of a bus route?". Again, this type of analysis (for a complete dataset) would be difficult at best using pad-and-paper or even a spreadsheet but becomes much easier when GIS is used.
You can also do visual analysis using GIS. For example, using data like in the senior center map at the beginning of this article, you could analyze whether senior centers are adequate to meet the needs of the community. You could also analyze Parks department work orders for mowing to see if work orders are distributed efficiently to different areas of town. Or you could compare where Recreation Program participants live to the Recreation Center they go to.
There are also ways you can use GIS to enhance presentation and reports (the art):
Enhancing presentations and reports An advertiser once said, "a picture is worth ten thousand words"... and he wasn't wrong. Pictures, and more specifically, maps, present the viewer with large amounts of data that they can absorb more quickly than text. In some cases, a map is clearer than text could be and in other cases a picture adds to the text to help the reader more thoroughly understand a concept/issue.
When we first started using GIS in our office, we didn't always present our results in a graphic format. We did a couple of sales tax and property tax audits where we used GIS as a tool but then presented the audit findings without any visual representation. Later, when we began incorporating our GIS analysis (i.e., maps) into our reports and presentation, our audience could better understand the work that we did and what our findings meant. For example, with our 2005 Sales Tax audit, we actually included a map of all of the 168 businesses within the city limits that were not attributed to the City of Austin. Doing so allowed our stakeholders to easily see the nature and extent of the misallocation.
Sometimes, even if GIS analysis is not critical to a project's methodology, it can still help augment an audit presentation or report. For example, when we did our audit of the electric utility's buried power line initiative, we used a map to provide a visual representation of the transit corridors impacted by the initiative. The map of the corridors allowed stakeholders to get a clearer, quicker picture of the corridors being discussed and the scope of the initiative.
Corrie Stokes, CIA, CGAP is an Assistant City Auditor in Austin, Texas where she has worked since 1999. She has worked on several audits that have involved using GIS as an analysis tool. She currently serves as the chair of ALGA's Communications Committee. She is also an active member of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA), an organization focused on using GIS in government, and serves as an evaluator for URISA's annual "exemplary systems in government" award.
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