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Research Streams in Continuous Audit: A Review and Analysis of the Existing Literature

This article provides an overview and framework for classifying continuous audit research. It covers demand factors, theory and guidance, enabling technologies, applications, and cost-benefit factors. The article includes over sixty papers and explores topics such as increasing complexity, electronic transactions, Sarbanes-Oxley, and more.

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Research Streams in Continuous Audit: A Review and Analysis of the Existing Literature

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  1. Research Streams in Continuous Audit: A Review and Analysis of the Existing Literature Carol E. Brown, Oregon State University Jeffrey A. Wong, Oregon State University Amelia A. Baldwin, University of Alabama

  2. Overview • Objective: summarize and provide a framework for classifying continuous audit research • Six major categories: • demand factors • theory and guidance • enabling technologies • applications • cost benefit factors • Over sixty papers included, more exist

  3. Demand Factors • Increasing complexity and data-intensiveness of the business environment (Alles, et al, 2002; Means and Warren 2005) • More electronic transactions (EDI etc), scrutiny important (Van Decker, 2004. Vasarhelyi, et al, 2004). • outsourcing • value chain integration • Users desire reliable information to be disclosed more frequently, more timely and in more detail (Elliot 2002; Means and Warren 2005) • WWW reporting (Elliot 2002; Kogan et al 1999) • XBRL based reporting (Alles, et al, 2002; Elliot 2002) • Sarbanes-Oxley -- companies must disclose certain information on a current basis (Vasarhelyi, et al, 2004; Vasarhelyi, et al, 2005; Harrison 2005; Means and Warren 2005)

  4. Impediments • Who will pay • Independence issues • Large start up costs • Who owns work product(Alles, et al, 2002)

  5. Theory and Guidance • Description of concepts (Vasarhelyi, 2002; Vasarhelyi and Greenstein, 2003; Razaee et al 2002; Abdolmohammadi and Sharbatouglie, 2005) • Framework (Vasarhelyi and Alles, 2005; Vasarhelyi et al, 2004) • Research Agenda(Kogan et al, 1999; Razaee et al 2002; CICA/AICPA 1999) • Implementation Challenges (DeWayne and Woodroof, 2003) • Substantial Implementation Guidance • 16 propositions for implementation methods (Greenstein and Ray, 2002) • Project management issues, approaches to development and generic example of a prototype (Abdolmohammadi and Sharbatouglie, 2005) • Conditions for viability, conduct of hypothetical audit (CICA/AICPA 1999) • Literature Review (Rezaee et al, 2002) • Practitioner General Education (Krass, 2002; McGuire et al, 2003; Vasarhelyi et al, 2002; White, 2005)

  6. Enabling Technologies • Belief Functions (Dutta and Srivastava 1993; Gillett and Srivastava 2000; Shafer and Srivastava 1990; Srivastava and Mock 2000; Srivastava and Shafer 1992) • Database (Borthick et al 2001; Groomer and Murthy 1989) • Expert Systems (Halper et al 1992; Gillett 1993; Boritz and Wensley 1990, 1992; Peters 1990; Bailey et al 1985, Meservy et al 1996 and many more) • Intelligent Agents(Nelson and Kogan 2000; Nelson et al 1998; Woodroof and Searcy 2001 and many more) • Neural Networks (Baker 2005; Coakley and Brown 1993, Brown and Coakley 1999, 2000; Ethridge et al 2000; Koskivaara 2000, 2004; Lin et al 2003 and many more) • XBRL/ XML (Rezaee and Hoffman 2001; Murthy and Groomer 2004 and many more)

  7. Applications • Case Studies • Product Descriptions • Application Domain

  8. Case Studies • Pilot implementation of the monitoring and control layer for continuous monitoring of business process controls (Alles et al, 2005a) • Continuous Process Auditing System (CPAS) developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories (Vasarhelyi & Halper 1991; Vasarhelyi & Halper 1991b; Vasarhelyi et al 1991) • FRAANK – Financial Reporting and Auditing Agent with Net Knowledge (Kogan et al, 2002) • Separation of duties - Algieba Corp.- SAP R/3(Boccasam and Kapoor, 2003) • Selective Monitoring and Assessment of Risks and Trends or SMART. (Rose and Hirte 1996)

  9. Product Descriptions • AuSoftware – • checks controls and audit issues at the most distributed levels in very large enterprises • tracks the effects of consolidation and reconciliations on data anomalies. (Sigvaldason and Warren 2005; Sigvaldason and Warren 2005b) • SQL Remote Guard – continuous monitoring and auditing of remote database access activity(Fonseca 2005) • Audit Command Language (ACL) - used for file interrogation, which enables direct access to computerized client data (Braun and Davis 2003)

  10. Application Domain • Emergency response management information systems (Turoff et al, 2004) • Business assurance analytics (BAA) (Van Decker 2004) • Electronic continuous audit of accounts payable (Potla 2003) • Continuous control monitoring (Glover and Romney 1998) (Huffman and Crump 2005)

  11. Cost Benefit Issues • Possible paths along which continuous assurance will evolve (Alles, et al 2002) • Long run operating cost of running database audit (Pathak et al 2005) • Benefits of timely discovery of errors, omissions, and defalcations. Cost-effectiveness of automated, software-driven audit procedures. (Means and Warren, 2005) • Discussion of economic feasibility (Kogan et al 1999) • Experimental market and laboratory experiment for Continuous Online Audit (COA) (Daigle and Lampe 2005) • Nine benefits of continuous business assurance analytics(Van Decker 2004)

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