ignore the coming tsunami of change at your own peril.
by alan anderson, cpa
transforming audit for the future
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“the new manifesto for accountants.“
the other day, i picked up a college textbook on auditing from 2001.
more: the disruptors: re-inventing accounting with tyler anderson | the big issues in audit: frustration, inconsistency and technology | five ways to increase audit efficiency | early adopters gain an edge in audit | talent retention: five tips for an audit adjustment | six benefits of an internal audit | the ten financial controls that’ll make you a hero | five cash reports you can’t live without | when an audit is a great thing
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even back then, that book listed these as “critical forces on the profession:”
- increasing market saturation with relatively little opportunity for growth
- perceptions that financial statement audits have become a commodity
- price competition and continual pressure to reduce fees
- cost pressures that have resulted in the reduction of time devoted to engagements
- perceptions that the incidence and severity of alleged audit failures have increased
in the 20-plus years since that book was published, not much has changed. today many of the college students who learned auditing from that textbook are in leadership positions at audit firms. they were warned about what we were up against.
that we are still facing those same “critical forces,” which have only exacerbated since then, is an indicator of the ossified state of leadership in the audit profession.
today, the current state of the audit is in jeopardy, and our profession has had a big stake in putting it there. the audit has evolved into what i call “chopping down trees.” auditors spend an awful lot of time ticking and tying and tracing amounts from an invoice to a ledger sheet or to a printout or a spreadsheet without really understanding what business the entity is in or whether a particular transaction makes sense for a client. we have driven down the value to a series of checklists. we don’t make the time to communicate with our clients and our staff to find out what really matters to them. clients don’t receive anything remotely of use to them to make their businesses better.
a report by the world economic forum puts audit as number four in the top twenty jobs with decreasing demand by 2025 through advances in automation and ai. now this report was looking at tasks in different occupations that can be automated, and not on the totality of the work. that report also says, “the tasks where humans are expected to retain their comparative advantage include managing, advising, decision-making, reasoning, communicating and interacting.” that means that to remain a viable profession. auditors will need to get better at the kinds of tasks that machines can’t do as well as humans.
the audit is seen by many as a commodity, or if not, it’s well on its way. tech changes that are already here pose an existential threat to audit. yet most auditors are keeping their heads in the sand, ignoring the coming tsunami of change that is changing almost everything about the world of accounting. who will need an audit of a historical financial statement when bots, ai, and blockchain provide all the assurance that lenders and stakeholders currently get from their auditors?
it’s a matter of time before audit is disrupted out of existence.
our clients are leveraging technology to run their businesses. financial dashboards give them an almost-real time view into their business performance, and they can monitor many of those dashboards from their phones. according to a recent ey survey of 1,000 cfos and finance professionals from around the world, over half think that over the next three years, robots and automation will be performing about half of the accounting tasks that humans currently do.
if that’s the future on the industry side, what does the future on the audit side look like? will there even be a need for audit if innovations in technology can monitor transactions in real-time?
some of this technology is not new. a good 25 years ago, i was working with a sunflower seed broker who matched companies that grew sunflower seeds with companies that bought sunflower seeds as a component for the bird seed they made. the banker that was providing financing for their line of credit connected the bank’s system to the client’s general ledger system. the banker could constantly monitor what was happening in the general ledger and was tracking differences between payables and receivables. each transaction was quite large, and each one of those transactions impacted the line of credit use.
what i thought was, if they had some metrics to kick out a notification when there was a deviation, then why would the banker need an audit? by connecting to the sunflower seed broker’s general ledger, the banker was already essentially performing a continuous, real-time audit.
just think – the financial services industry had the means 25 years ago to move to real-time gl connection with banking customers but hasn’t yet taken advantage of the opportunity to move banking into the modern world. it’s a matter of time before the audit is disrupted out of existence. as pascal finette said in a keynote at digital cpa in 2019, “what kills you does not look like you.”