A few weeks ago I participated in the 26th World Continuous Auditing and Reporting Symposium at Rutgers Business School. I think it was about the 12th occasion at which I have presented at the Symposium. Initially, WCARS was heavily oriented towards academic research and technical papers on continuous auditing concepts. In more recent years, WCARS has become one of the most important forums for discussions not just on continuous auditing and monitoring, but increasingly on the use of audit automation technology overall. Although a relatively small conference, there is now strong participation from audit technology leadership from the Big 4, the AICPA and internal audit from some of the world’s largest business organizations.
My presentation focused on the importance of integrating audit and risk analytics into audit and risk management processes overall, as well as an integrated technology solution to enable this in a way that has not been achieved in the past.
Although there has been steady progress in the effective use of audit analytics and continuous auditing and monitoring over the years, it is still not yet close to the levels that the audit professions want to achieve. At ACL we believe that the solution lies in a transformed approach using a suite of integrated technology for audit and risk processes. This lies at the core of our ongoing product strategy.
