Financial executives have witnessed a dramatic rise in compliance-related expenses given regulations related to maintaining systems of internal control and the cost of internal and external audits. Members of FEI’s Committee on Finance & IT (CFIT) and Committee on GRC (CGRC) believe the use of analytics has the potential to help management, and internal and external audit, improve systems and conduct more effective and efficient audits.
Advances in technology, specifically the use of automated analytics, provide opportunities to improve the approach to internal control monitoring and audit verification. One of the significant trends enabled by technology is replacing sampling with automated reviews of entire populations of data. Auditing standards and processes, many written before today’s technologies were invented, will have to evolve.
To find out how auditors are using technology, external auditors and internal auditors, as well as technology solution providers, were interviewed for this report.