The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) had jointly developed an assurance service designated as SysTrust designed to enhance the comfort level of management, business partners, and customers with systems being used in an organization that support business activities. In a SysTrust audit engagement, the auditor tests and evaluates as to whether or not a particular system is reliable when evaluated against three most essential principles of availability, integrity, and security. SysTrust is designed on the framework of the Principles of Trust Services and their Criteria. The SysTrust auditor gives his opinion on the management’s requirements whether effective controls have been maintained to provide a reasonable assurance that all the SysTrust objectives and principals have been achieved. AS the principles and criteria of SysTrust are pre established and openly available to any user, the auditor’s report need not be restricted to specific parts. On the other hand a SAS-70 audit assignment is to provide a report assurance to user organizations and the user’s auditors in respect of the service organization's internal controls. The service auditor gives an unbiased opinion as to whether the internal controls and procedures were suitably and properly designed, put into operation, and are operating effectively as desired. Under the SAS-70 audit, the service auditor's opinion, along with a description of the internal controls at service organization, and tests and the results thereof of the service auditor's procedures are included in the audit report. The major difference in the two audits is the scope of audit. While the SAS-70 audit provides for a report on the effectiveness and adequacy of internal controls in an organization, the SysTrust Audit provides for a report of the systems reliability and use a predefined set of criteria and principles for all types of audit engagements. The objective of SAS-70 is to provide audit assurances to the customers for use by their respective auditors where as in SysTrust the Audit report is meant for internal use of the organization only.
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The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) had jointly developed an assurance service designated as SysTrust designed to enhance the comfort level of management, business partners, and customers with systems being used in an organization that support business activities.
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