Abstract:

Internal audit departments are more than ever before pressured to reduce costs and become more efficient. The use of IT has proven to be a suitable means to achieve this efficiency gain, but also holds limits in the audit area. One approach which tries to overcome these limits and has gained popularity over recent years is the concept of continuous auditing. Continuous auditing deals with the highly frequented or even continuous testing of diverse business activities by means of identifying exceptions or abnormalities, partly with assistance of technology. It may be applied to any kind of data and helps the auditor to focus his manual audit activities on areas with high risk. Despite its potential, we find that companies refrain from using continuous auditing on a large scale which is supported by a range of other studies. This is mostly because of its high implementation efforts and the limited availability of corporate data in digital form. Still, continuous auditing represents a promising supplement to traditional auditing which may more and more enter daily audit practice and change auditors’ operational work towards a more automated, risk-oriented approach in near future.