Abstract:

The auditing is subject to a permanent change, both national and international regulators have launched numerous reform projects and legislative initiatives relating to the audit of financial statements which have been partial implemented by now.‘ In addition, digitalization is increasingly driving the profile of the auditor, whereby a central development relates to big data analytics which is reviewed in details in the course of information technology (IT) supported testing techniques? Beside the topic of big data, auditors are more and more confronted with artificial intelligence, cloud computing and audit data analytics as consequence of the digitalization.3 Auditors respectively auditing firms, among others, count to the direct corporate externals who ensure the reliability of the provided information from the stakeholders’ perspective through monitoring of the corporate reporting.‘ Through the auditing services, which are often summarized as economic auditing, the auditor fulfills a public task that is subdivided into a control function in the sense of review of an adequate compliance with standard on the one hand and into an information and certification function on the other hand, whereby the latter expresses especially through the formulation of the correspondent auditor’s quality evaluation like for instance through the auditor’s opinion or refusal of the required govemmental financial statement.5 Those functions of economic auditing conduce to the protection of interests of shareholders and creditors as well as to protect the general public interest of a due form and thus meaningful corporate reporting."