（2003）Continuous Assurance： We Are Way Overdue.pdfVIP

Copyright ©Copyright © 2004 Information Systems Audit and Control Association. All rights reserved. .2003 Information Systems Audit and Control Association. All rights reserved. . Continuous Assurance: We Are Way Overdue By Dan C. Kneer, Ph.D., CPA, CFE Consider the Past nology. Voice-activated kiosks drive instant revenue recogni- In the US, annual (e.g., look-back) financial statements tion. Retail is now e-tail. Brick-and-mortar is now click-and- have been attested to for more than seven decades. Annual order. (What we need is click-and-monitor!) It is the “e-afica- attestations worked well, in the “pre” world (pre-real-time pro- tion of business.” We are interested in click counts now. We cessing, pre-Internet, pre-e-commerce). Think about auditing aggressively recognize revenue. We profile customers via Ford Motor Company in 1941. Its applications were paper- CRM and push relentless advertisements at them. Hard assets bound and batch processing. Real-time inventory control (and (property and inventory) are replaced by soft assets (intellectu- supply chain management) was a dream. The audit was an al property rights). The paper audit trail turns to vapor. The exercise in vouching and tracing a paper trail. Investors were network is the business. happy to get annual attestations, because before that, they We see outlandish statements such as, “My router is my received nothing or (potentially) biased management com- firewall,” while knowing that a 13-year-old could take down a ments. Investors received audit reports in the glossy financial dot-com in a matt