（2009）Information Fusion in Continuous Assurance.pdfVIP

Information Fusion in Continuous Assurance Johan L. Perols Assistant Professor of Accountancy School of Business Administration University of San Diego San Diego, CA 92110 jperols@ Uday S. Murthy Professor Quinn Eminent Scholar of Accounting Information Systems School of Accountancy College of Business Administration University of South Florida Tampa FL 33620-5500 umurthy@ June 1, 2009 Submitted for consideration for presentation at the 2009 UWCISA Symposium on Information Integrity and Information Systems Assurance Information Fusion in Continuous Assurance ABSTRACT We extend continuous assurance research by proposing a novel continuous assurance architecture grounded in information fusion research. Existing continuous assurance architectures focus primarily on methods of monitoring assurance clients’ systems to detect anomalous activities and have not addressed the question of how to process the detected anomalies. Consequently, actual implementations of these systems typically detect a large number of anomalies, with the resulting information overload leading to suboptimal decision making due to human information processing limitations. The proposed architecture addresses these issues by performing anomaly detection, aggregation and evaluation. Within the proposed architecture, artifacts developed in prior continuous assurance, REA and artificial intelligence research are used to perform the detection, aggregation and evaluation information fusion tasks. The architecture contributes to