Three essays on audit innovation: using social media information and disruptive technologies to enhance audit quality

Andrea M. Rozario
2019
Advances in technology occur at exponential rates and are transforming business practices. Alles (2015) suggests that audit clients' use of advanced technologies is likely to be the driver of adoption of such technologies by auditors. As a result, it is not surprising that the audit community, including academics, regulators, and audit professionals, are debating to what extent the use of technology will impact auditing (IAASB 2016; PCAOB 2017b). However, the impact of technology on auditing
more » ... ains unclear. To provide insights into this debate, this dissertation explores the evolution of auditing as a result of nontraditional audit evidence, RPA (robotic process automation), and blockchain and smart contracts. The first essay examines the usefulness of third-party generated information about firms' brands and products from social media in enhancing substantive analytical procedures for the revenue account. The research questions in this study address whether Twitter measures of consumer interest and consumer satisfaction can improve the prediction performance and error detection performance of substantive analytical models. Extant research has documented that external nonfinancial information from Internet platforms can be useful for predicting firm performance and stock market prices, accordingly, it is important to examine whether such type of information can be used as an external source of audit evidence and enhance the effectiveness of audit procedures. The results of the study suggest that analytical models with Twitter proxies experience improved prediction and error detection performance than models that do not contain this information. Especially the analytical model that contains prior month sales, gross domestic product, and consumer interest as this model produces superior predictions and detects accounting errors for most of the industries that are examined. Collectively, these findings indicate that auditors can benefit from including social media information in analytical models as it can compleme [...]
doi:10.7282/t3-fmt3-px02 fatcat:reaorxfbxnafdff6k4i3kolgfa