حسابرسی مستمر: ایجاد قابلیت حسابرسی خودکار Continuous Auditing: Building Automated Auditing Capability

Introduction Electronic commerce, electronic data interchange (EDI), and the Internet are dramatically changing business practices and record keeping. Doing business on the World Wide Web enables organizations to connect into the online world and improve all aspects of their business. In this high-technology environment business transactions are conducted entirely in electronic form. Technological advances have taken the form of low-cost, high-speed digital data transmission by utilizing hardware that produces information quickly and easily, and using software that reduces and, in many cases, eliminates much time, space, and other constraints to information. The progress in information technology, while reducing both transaction costs and asymmetric information problems, has increased economies of scale and scope in all business sectors (Albrecht and Sack 2000). The 1998 Vision Project of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) states that technological advances are significant forces affecting the accounting profession (AICPA 1998a). Traditionally, credible financial reports could only be produced on a periodic basis, primarily because the information needed to generate the reports was too costly to obtain on a real-time basis. Consequently, reports have been issued months after the occurrence of the actual events they represent. In this setting, auditing is mostly a backward-looking exercise testing the accuracy of the reported numbers. Today, organizations can produce standardized financial information on a real-time, online basis. The time is near when companies will allow shareholders and others to have access to real-time corporate financial information. Real-time accounting needs real-time auditing to provide continuous assurance about the quality of the data. Thus, continuous auditing is likely to become commonplace as audit clients increasingly shift to electronic real-time accounting systems. Continuous auditing enables auditors to significantly reduce and perhaps eliminate the time between occurrence of the client’s events and the auditor’s assurance services thereon.