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An International Meeting of American Accounting
Association
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A Framework for Independent Continuous Auditing of Financial Statements |
Hui Du
The Univesity of Texas - Pan American
Saeed Roohani
Bryant University
Abstract: “Continuous audit” has been defined by the AICPA/CICA “as a methodology that enables the auditor to provide assurance on a subject matter simultaneously with, or very shortly after, the occurrence of events underlying the subject matter.” The continuous auditing models proposed in the literature are mostly developed for internal audit purpose or required to embed auditing mechanisms into a client’s systems. Consequently, the potential application of continuous audit in the independent financial statement audit is unclear. The purpose of this paper is to propose a continuous auditing framework that provides auditors the opportunity to audit clients continuously or on a more frequent basis. The framework requires the creation of an auditing system separate from the auditee system so that the two systems do not interfere with each other. The auditing system must communicate smoothly and effectively with auditee systems to continuously process data captured from the auditee systems.