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Current State and Future Perspectives of Auditing Blockchain Technology

The statement that ‘the future is today’ is more than ever applicable to the current business environment. Due to the outbreak of Covid-19, the pandemic circumstances accelerated digitalization processes in all spheres of private and business life. As a result, technology opportunities are evolving at a rapid, almost exponential pace. Emerging information-communication technologies (ICT) create new needs, demands, jobs, and the necessity for new employees' skills, knowledge, and competencies across sectors. The prime objective of emerging technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, edge computing, quantum computing, machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, Internet of Things (IoT) is to help and ease living conditions and business operations. Furthermore, technology increases efficiency, speeds up accomplishing goals, or creates new ways, ideas and products. Nevertheless, introducing advanced technology and automation of processes is not inexpensive and risk-free. Those technology changes did not bypass the financial statement audits either. Introducing blockchain technology into the business environment of the companies imposes certain adjustments to their accounting systems and results in changes in financial statement elements. The principles, integrity, and security of blockchain technology offer diverse application opportunities for companies and auditors. From the aspect of business operations, its only-add-data principle makes it an appropriate tool for smart contracting, secure medical data sharing, supply chains, logistics, voting mechanisms and royalty programs tracking. The benefits of blockchain technology include eliminating mediators, accelerating processes and adding accountability. It also helps boost other technologies like the Internet of Things or cybersecurity, personal information (ID) processing, taxation processes, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and telecommunications. On the other side, the auditing profession is facing two conditional aspects. The first is auditing blockchain-supported business processes, and the second is to adopt the technology as an auditing tool. In an ICT environment, auditors must gain appropriate skills, competencies, and knowledge, adopt the new methodology and implement contemporary audit procedures where a particular role should have advanced data analytics. Furthermore, although blockchain characterizes integrity and data security, it should be a subject of auditing. Although blockchain technology provides a high level of automation and recording encrypted non-changing data and represents a digital ledger of transactions where accountants seem needless, overall, the accounting and auditing profession obtains a new higher-level role. When the question of human mistakes becomes irrelevant, the question of fraud, manipulations, wrong programming, and algorithms becomes crucial. In addition, they need to handle new, until recently unknown, risks such as data confidentiality, technology development, integration, and governance (maintaining and enhancement processes), managing big data, regulatory risks, and others. Therefore, professional accountants should include blockchain technology in their assurance engagements to ensure that financial statements give an accurate and fair view of the financial position, business performance, and cash flows. A new audit paradigm generally incorporates rapid data recovery, shortening audit cycles, analyzing populations instead of samples, processes automation, and applying complex data analytics. This chapter introduces a systematic overview of the framework for auditing blockchain technology supported by advanced data analytics. Next, it elaborates on how auditors can benefit from blockchain technology to improve their audit methodology. Finally, it also gives an overview of the current state and future perspective from professional accountants' point of view.

blockchain ; financial statement audit ; external auditors ; continuous auditing ; data analytics ; analytical procedures

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