Continuous audit: the motivations, benefits, problems, and challenges identified by partners of a Big 4 accounting firm

Early efforts regarding research on a new area of interest are, by nature, exploratory. Before theoretical models can be built and before meaningful empirical research can be performed, a careful process of identifying the appropriate research questions and problems must be undertaken. This is the current state of research regarding the relatively new area of the continuous audit (CA). Though the concepts of CA have been around for almost a decade, and recent advances have made the technologies both widely available and very affordable, firms have yet to make significant steps toward implementation. Thus, there is a need for exploratory surveys of key audit personnel in charge of providing assurance services for major clients to bring to light the issues regarding technology, people, and processes with which auditors and their audit clients are wrestling. This paper discusses the results of a survey of the U.S. assurance partners of a Big 4 accounting firm. The objective of the survey was to get the partners´ perceptions and thoughts on the viability of the continuous auditing, the current state of the CA in the audit environment, the impact that CA implementation might have, and the various roadblocks to CA implementation. In addition, various demographic data was collected. So that the open-ended questions of the survey instrument could be systematically categorized and analyzed, and to minimize interpretation bias, QSR NUD-IST© (nonumerical unstructured data-indexing, searching, and theorizing) version 4 software was used to code responses and capture emergent themes. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of this survey, revealing the current state of the CA and the hurdles to overcome in its implementation.