Obstacles in the Design and Implementation of Smart Contract-Driven Automated Audit Processes

Abstract

Traditional auditing processes are inefficient and produce low-quality audit reports due to human intervention. This research project constructs a novel automated auditing architecture based on smart contracts, comprising four functional modules: (i) data acquisition, (ii) rule encoding, (iii) execution verification, and (iv) report output. This paper demonstrates how to achieve a high-throughput, low-latency, and verifiable automated auditing system by utilizing technologies such as multi-source data cross-validation, formal encoding of audit rules, privacy protection based on zero-knowledge proofs, and cross-chain communication. The developed novel auditing process can shorten the traditional audit cycle to 8 to 15 days, reduce manual operation costs by 37.5% to 44.4%, reduce the error rate to 0.2% to 0.5%, and exhibit high fault tolerance during disaster recovery, making it an effective approach to achieve digital transformation of auditing processes.