Hadi Nurhadi, Mahdi Mahdi, Irdawati Irdawati, Meliana Meliana
This article examines how the adoption of blockchain technology influences audit efficiency and fraud detection within modern accounting practice. As financial transactions increasingly move into distributed ledger environments, external auditors are compelled to revisit the assumptions, procedures, and tools that underpin traditional assurance work. Through a systematic review of contemporary auditing, accounting information systems, and financial technology literature, this study identifies the mechanisms through which blockchain reshapes the audit process. The findings indicate that blockchain adoption enhances efficiency primarily by enabling real-time access to immutable transaction records, reducing reliance on sampling-based procedures, automating control testing through smart contracts, and facilitating continuous auditing. At the same time, the technology strengthens fraud detection capacity by improving the traceability of transactions, increasing the difficulty of retroactive manipulation, and supporting forensic analysis of anomalous patterns. However, the realization of these benefits is conditional on several factors, including auditor competence, integration with legacy systems, regulatory clarity, data privacy constraints, and the risk that fraud shifts to points where the blockchain boundary intersects with off-chain processes. The review concludes that blockchain does not eliminate the need for professional skepticism; rather, it redefines the focus of auditor judgment from verifying recorded transactions to evaluating the reliability of the underlying technology environment and its governance. Practical implications for audit firms, standard-setting bodies, and regulators are discussed.
Purpose This study examines how auditors respond to firms' disclosed blockchain engagement. While the technology offers potential efficiency gains, it also introduces new risks and complexity. We investigate whether and how auditors use audit pricing and auditor resignation as their strategies to manage blockchain-related risks. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a large sample of Chinese A-share listed companies spanning 2016 to 2022. We extract data regarding corporate blockchain engagement by conducting textual analysis on firmsâ publicly disclosed reports. Regression analysis is applied to verify the research hypotheses, followed by a series of robustness tests. In addition, we carry out cross-sectional tests and examine auditorsâ responses to distinct categories of blockchain-related activities. We further investigate the relative priority of auditorsâ risk management strategies and identify potential channels. Findings There is a positive relation between firmsâ disclosed blockchain engagement and audit fees. This relation is more pronounced among larger audit firms, auditors without an information technology (IT) background and those with shorter tenures. Both audit effort and audit risk serve as two plausible channels linking companiesâ engagement in blockchain to increased audit fees. Firms engaging in blockchain to facilitate management processes, rather than provide blockchain-related products or services, are associated with elevated audit fees. Although blockchain engagement is also related to a higher likelihood of auditor resignation, we observe a hierarchical pattern in auditor responses, with fee adjustments being the more prevalent initial reaction relative to resignation. Research limitations/implications Our disclosure-based measure may not fully distinguish the depth of adoption, investor-facing signaling or strategic narrative because doing so would require obtaining in-depth blockchain data from the sample firms. This is highly challenging as such data are not subject to mandatory disclosure by regulators and may constitute corporate confidential information. Our findings should be interpreted as auditorsâ responses to âperceived blockchain-related risksâ rather than a direct response to âthe adoption of blockchain technology.â Practical implications First, for audit firms, our results underscore the importance of investing in technological training and developing firm-level expertise in emerging technologies such as blockchain. The finding that the fee premium is concentrated among auditors without IT backgrounds suggests that audit firms that proactively build technological competence may be better positioned to serve clients engaging with new technologies while managing their own costs. Second, for corporate managers, our findings alert them that public blockchain engagement, even when disclosed for strategic signaling purposes, may carry tangible costs in the form of higher audit fees, particularly when blockchain is deployed for internal management processes. This cost should be factored into firmsâ costâbenefit analyses when making blockchain investment decisions. Third, for regulators and standard-setters, the heterogeneity in auditor responses documented in our study highlights the need for clearer accounting and auditing guidance for blockchain-based transactions, which would reduce the uncertainty that currently drives elevated audit pricing. Originality/value This study provides evidence consistent with auditors strategically adapting to technological disruptions in their risk management practices. The study offers timely and practical insights for auditors, regulators and corporate managers as blockchain applications continue to proliferate.
Baocheng Zeng, Jinhao Yang, Peilin Han, Kangnan He
Public cryptocurrency archives may appear usable when files exist, although factor research requires observations available and executable at each decision time. We audit public Binance BTCUSDT USD-M perpetual-futures data using event, publication, and availability times and separate proposal from deterministic auditing, evaluation, and holdout access. An initial gapless five-minute requirement for trade, mark, index, and open interest failed: the longest unrepaired intersection was 304.5729166666667 days. A disclosed revision made trade, mark, index, and realized funding the core streams and made open interest optional because its publication time was unverified. The revised mask retained 727 complete UTC days and supported a 436/145/146-day train, validation, and historical-holdout split. On 80 frozen known-rule templates, the auditor detected 40/40 violations and rejected 0/40 legal templates. Across ten null-signal paths, full auditing reduced mean false passes from 0.2910 to 0.0625. Under matched valid-candidate budgets, the audited adaptive agent tied random search and did not establish superiority. In the one-time historical holdout, all evaluated runs had positive IC but negative net Sharpe under primary costs. We therefore report a scoped negative result rather than a profitability or agent-superiority claim.
This review synthesizes theoretical and empirical insights from 1055 peer-reviewed articles on artificial intelligence (AI), corporate governance, and ethics. Situated in the corporate governance and accounting literature, it develops a computational framework to identify thematic patterns and conceptual links among AI, transparency, accounting, governance, and ESG. Using latent Dirichlet allocation, co-occurrence network analysis, sentence-level semantic similarity, and exploratory regression, the study identifies three recurring configurations of conceptual association: (1) Ethics, Governance, and Transparency; (2) Machine Learning, Finance, Blockchain, and Accounting; and (3) Corporate, ESG, and Accounting. The findings indicate that these themes are repeatedly connected within the scholarly literature.
The main objective of this study was to examine the effect of blockchain technology on future of external auditing in Nigeria. Decentralized network and consensus mechanism were the proxies for blockchain technology. Thus, two hypotheses were formulated to guide the investigation and the statistical test of parameter estimates was conducted using least squares regression model operated with E-Views.12. Survey design was adopted and data for the study was obtained through the use of e-questionnaire survey sent to the various Staff WhatsApp Group Platform of the selected audit firms in Anambra State Nigeria. The results of the study reveal that the use of decentralized network has positive and significant effect on the future of external auditing in Nigeria at 1% level of significance. Also, the use of consensus mechanism in auditing has positive and significant effect on the future of external auditing in Nigeria at 5% significant level. Based on this, the study concludes that blockchain technology ensure the future of external auditing in Nigeria. In lieu of the findings of the study, the study recommends for the continual use of decentralized network in auditing as the future of external auditing lies on it. Also, the use of consensus mechanism should also be encouraged as it ensures accuracy and reliability in audit reporting.
Blockchain technology records transactions on a distributed ledger that is cryptographically chained, replicated across independent nodes, and validated by consensus rather than by any single institution. Because the technology verifies that recorded transactions occurred and have not been altered, some commentators have concluded that it will make external auditors redundant. This article rejects that conclusion but takes the underlying disruption seriously. It argues that blockchain automates a narrow and historically labor-intensive slice of the audit, namely the verification of the existence, occurrence, and mathematical accuracy of recorded transactions, while leaving untouched the components of assurance that depend on professional judgment: valuation, accounting estimates, classification, completeness of off-chain events, related party identification, and going concern assessment. At the same time, the technology creates new objects that require assurance, including consensus protocols, cryptographic key management, smart contract code, and the oracles that connect ledgers to the physical world. The article examines the consequences for auditing standards, particularly the treatment of blockchain records as audit evidence, and for the education, skills, and business model of the profession. The external auditorâs future role, it concludes, lies not in verifying transactions but in assuring the systems that now verify them, and in exercising the judgment that no ledger can encode.
The rapid diffusion of digital technologies has fundamentally reshaped the way organizations generate and report financial and non-financial information, challenging traditional audit approaches that rely on manual and sample-based procedures. Building on this context, this paper aimed to provide a comprehensive synthesis of empirical evidence regarding the impact of digital technologies on auditing and to identify the key factors influencing their adoption across internal, external, and public sector audit functions during the 2015â2026 period. Using a qualitative descriptive design and a systematic literature review guided by the PICOC framework and PRISMA protocol, 33 relevant articles indexed in Scopus were selected from an initial pool of 959 publications. The findings showed that the use of various technologies, including computer-assisted audit techniques (CAATs), audit analytics, big data, artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, blockchain, and process mining, generally enhanced the effectiveness and efficiency of audit procedures, strengthened internal controls, and reduced errors and financial statement restatements, while simultaneously repositioning auditors as more strategic and data-driven partners. At the same time, the success of digital audit transformation was strongly influenced by technological infrastructure, data governance and security, organizational capabilities, leadership support, regulatory environments, and auditorsâ individual competencies, indicating that digitalization was neither a neutral nor an automatic process. This study provides practical implications for audit firms, internal audit units, supreme audit institutions, and regulators in developing more targeted and sustainable digital audit strategies, while also proposing future research directions concerning the organizational and institutional dynamics of digital auditing.