Electronically auditing EDP systems: With the support of emerging information technologies

Abstract

The increasing dependence upon electronic data processing (EDP) systems in modern organizations has raised serious concerns from auditing practitioners and professional organizations. With the rapid advances on the Internet, many modern information technologies have emerged. Examples are object-oriented distributed middlewares, Internet security technologies, and intelligent agents. While the majority of the current research work addresses specific auditing concerns regarding specific information technology (such as EDI), this article discusses how some of the computer-assisted auditing techniques (CAATs) may be more effectively used with the emerging information technologies. More importantly, this article proposes a new approach toward EDP auditing, called electronic auditing (EA). We constructed an infrastructure with the support of emerging technologies so that some of the audit work can be performed in an electronic and automatic manner. For concept verification, we also provide enough technical details to demonstrate the feasibility of this EA approach using a research prototype system as a working example. This system emulates EDP applications in the banking industry and is based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) architecture industrial standard, one of the well-known distributed middlewares.