Has Technology Revolutionized Auditing?

Technology has given us many things, some in succession and the others all at once. Over the years we’ve learned to tackle the impact of IT on several different aspects of society and workings of a state. However, it is also a continuous and forever changing process; the update and advancement of technology! The institutes or entities responsible or concerned with doing work explicitly regarding technology and moving forward with it, continue to keep on with their work.

The bouts of changes that technology and advanced development has brought into everyday life is astonishing, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned from it, it is that it will continue to surprise us in the most unexpected of ways, and impossibility of an idea to come to fruition is impossible in today’s world.

If we talk about bank statutory audit 2019 and statutory branch audit 2019, a lot has changed now as we’re almost towards the end of 2020. The difference in practices, standards, and measures is huge. This difference is due to the fact that regional compliance and standards differ from each other. Each country, or specific region within that geography has their own pre-decided laws and regulatory functions to have a smooth flow of activities, whether that’s auditing or any other financial function.

If we talk about statutory audit and external audit alone, there’s much you have to discuss in updates alone. Technology’s main forte these days is data, its collection, analytics, and manipulation in some cases. Whether it’s a big entity or small, changes are made when basic standardised procedures are changed from within regulatory authorities.

So how really has the effect taken place? Is it positive, is it negative, or is there a grey area we could find. Then comes the question of whom these changes benefit really, the companies or the auditors because audited statutory financial statements are for the company’s benefit. Will we call it a revolution for the auditing function? All these questions are important to discuss to know where we stand, how far we have come.

To name a few big and important aspects of technological advancements, smart contracts, data analytics, distributed ledger technology (DLT), cloud technologies, robotic process automation (RPA), drone technology, machine learning (ML), amongst others. Data is a much bigger and complicated aspect of technology now, and it’s definitely not the same as a decade or even a couple of years ago. Information Technology has come so far that charting the advancements would take us down a whole other rabbit hole.

Seeing the connection between this technological advancement in business aspects makes you easily realize how then it affects auditing. The connection data has with audit is very direct and extremely vital, so to drill down the fact that focusing on data-based changes to start inspecting this might be key for important financial auditing firms.