ABSTRACT
During COVID-19 pandemic many projects were managed remotely facing challenges and gaining benefits out of that new way of work. This paper falls under the Project Management category to address COVID-19 challenges and opportunities faced IT auditors and IT auditees during the remote IT audit. The scope of this paper is to know how IT auditors managed their work, addressing the challenges they faced, and how the oil and gas sector can benefit from conducting virtual IT audit going forward. In addition to that, the paper will cover IT auditees experience with the new audit technique. The methodology this paper will cover is comparing IT audit preparation, outcome, and auditee responses before and during COVID-19 by conducting interviews with IT auditors and IT auditees within ADNOC group. It will also cover IT audit strategies and techniques that have been applied in order to assure having a successful audit during this critical time. This year, IT auditors in ADNOC group of companies are still conducting audits virtually. The outcome of this paper would be used as a guidance to support IT auditors in oil and gas sector by: 1. Sharing challenges and opportunities IT auditors and IT auditees faced. 2. Sharing best practices of virtual IT audit. 3. Sharing lessons learned and provide recommendations on how to avoid addressed challenges. A virtual audit is a new technique that auditors were forced to deal with, because of COVID-19 pandemic, to perform their tasks. Presenting the challenges and opportunities faced especially in IT audits will benefit the petroleum industry to reduce gaps in this area and benefit from the lessons learned. Copyright © 2022, Society of Petroleum Engineers.