Auditability in the Digital Age

Abstract

In this Perspective essay, I offer some provocations about the future of auditing. I suggest that auditing is currently undergoing technological change in its practice unlike any other in its history in which notions of evidence and auditability have become fluid. The pervasiveness of algorithms in auditee systems necessitates that auditing itself becomes algorithmic in nature. Although there may be considerable efficiency benefits from this, there is a risk that auditing becomes ‘platformized’ as one app attached to auditee systems. This in turn implicates the non-independence of the evidentiary basis of the audit. At the extreme, auditing becomes algorithmically self-referential, and the human auditor is reduced to the ‘de-skilled’ curator of analytical models and their decisions. At the same time, the underlying algorithms remain beyond auditability and human comprehension. I suggest that scholars have an opportunity to explore these processes empirically and that practitioners and professional institutes need to be vigilant about the side effects of technology in auditing. They must nurture the human-centric and dialogic nature of the practice in the face of these changes.