User:Reisenh/Financial audit

Origins of Financial Audit
The origins of financial audit begin in the 1800s in England, where the need for accountability first arose. As people began to recognize the benefits of financial audits, the need for standardization became more apparent and the use of financial audits spread into the United States. In the early 1900s financial audits began to take on a form more resembling what is see in the twenty-first century.

The first laws surrounding audit formed in England in the beginning of the nineteenth century and helped the financial sector in England prosper. To fully gain the trust of the public, the auditor profession would need to grow and standardize itself and establish organizations, becoming equally accountable across the country and the world.

In 1845 England, accompanied by new law, the first corporation was formed. The law required auditors who owned a share of the company but who did not directly manage the company’s operations. Audit financial documents had been presented to shareholders, but at this point anyone could be an auditor. In these early days there was little accountability or standardization.

Financial auditing, and various other English accounting practices, first came to the United States in the late nineteenth century. These practices came by way of British and Scottish investors who wanted to stay more informed on their American investments. Around this same time, an American accounting system was taking root.

Within the next 10 years (1896), professionals had the opportunity to become accredited by obtaining a license to become a Certified Public Accountant. Copious amounts of the auditing work done at the end of the 19th century were by chartered accountants from England and Scotland. This included the work of Arthur Young, Edwin Guthrie, and James T. Anyon.

In the 1910s financial audits came under scrutiny for their unstandardized practices of accounting for various items, including tangible and intangible assets. Notably was the article “The Abuse of the Audit in Selling Securities” written by Alexander Smith in 1912, the article detailed the flaws of the auditing system. While others in the industry agreed with Mr. Smith’s comments, many believed standardization was impossible.

As the reputation of accounting firms grew, federal agencies began to seek out their advice. The Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve Board inquired about auditing procedures by requesting a technical memorandum in 1917. The Institute provided this guidance, which was to be published by the Federal Reserve Board as a bulletin. The Board and FTC each had their own agenda by requesting this memorandum. The former wanted to inform bankers on how important it was to obtain audited financial statements from borrowers, whilst the latter was to encourage uniform accounting. This bulletin included information about recommended auditing procedures in addition to the format for the profit and loss statement and the balance sheet. The memorandum was revised and published making it the first authoritative guidance published in the United States in regard to auditing procedures.

It wasn’t until 1932 when the New York Stock Exchange began requiring financial audits, that the practice started to standardize. It did not become a requirement for newly listed companies until 1933 when the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 were enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The latter created the Securities and Exchange Commission, which required all current and new registrants to have audited financial statements. In doing so, the services that CPAs could provide became more valued and requested.

In the United States, the accounting and auditing profession reached its peak from the 1940s to the 1960s. The SEC was reliant on the Institute for the auditing procedures used by accounting firms during engagements. Additionally, in 1947 a committee from the Institute advocated for “generally accepted auditing standards”, which were approved in the following year. These standards governed the terms of the auditor's performance relating to professional conduct and the execution of the auditor's judgment during engagements.

The Impact of Information Technology on the Audit Process
Over the past couple of years, technology is becoming a bigger emphasis for the audit profession, professional bodies, and regulators. From operational efficiency to financial inclusion and increased insights, technology has a lot to offer. The way businesses are performed and data is analyzed is changing as a result of technological advancements. Data management is becoming increasingly important. Artificial intelligence, blockchain, and data analytics are major changers in the accounting and auditing industries, altering auditors' roles. The introduction of cloud computing and cloud storage has opened up previously unimaginable possibilities for data collection and analysis. Auditors can now acquire and analyze broader industry data sets that were previously unreachable by going beyond the constraints of business data. As a result, auditors are better equipped to spot data anomalies, create business insights, and focus on business and financial reporting risk.

Artificial Intelligence
This refers to machines that do tasks that need some kind of 'intelligence,' which can include learning, sensing, thinking, creating, attaining goals, and generating and interpreting language. Recent advances in AI have relied on approaches like machine learning and deep learning, in which algorithms learn how to do tasks like classify objects or predict values through statistical analysis of enormous amounts of data rather than explicit programming.

Machine learning uses data analytics to simultaneously and continuously learn and identify data patterns allowing it to make predictions based on the data. Currently, Delloite and PricewaterhouseCooper (PWC) are both using machine learning tools within their companies to aid in financial auditing. Deloitte uses a software called Argus which  reads and scans documents to identify key contract terms and other outliers within the documents. And PWC uses Halo which is another machine learning technology that analyzes journal entries in the accounting books to identify areas of concern.

Blockchain
Blockchain is a fundamental shift in the way records are created, maintained, and updated. Blockchain records are distributed among all users rather than having a single owner. The blockchain approach's success is based on the employment of a complicated system of agreement and verification to ensure that, despite the lack of a central owner and time gaps between all users, a single, agreed-upon version of the truth is propagated to all users as part of a permanent record. This results in a type of 'universal entry bookkeeping,' in which each participant receives an identical and permanent copy of a single entry.

Blockchain technology has seen its growth within the financial auditing sector. Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed ledger, which makes it reliable and nearly impossible to be breached. Blockchain is also able to verify the authenticity of transactions in real time, giving it the ability to alert necessary parties for fraud. This helps improve the audit process and the accuracy of the audit. Before, auditors had to manually go through thousands of entries in a sample and now with blockchain technology, every single transaction is verified as soon as it is entered.

Cyber Security
Cyber security protects networks, systems, devices, and data from attack, unauthorized access, and harm. Cyber security best practices also include a broader range of operations such as monitoring IT infrastructures, detecting attacks or breaches, and responding to security failures. The spread of cyber risk across all organizational activities, the external nature of many of the risks, and the rate of change in the risk are just a few of the issues that organizations face in developing effective risk management around cyber security.

Numerous banks and financial organizations are studying blockchain security solutions as a means of mitigating risk, cyber risks, and fraud. While these latter systems are less susceptible to cyberattacks that may bring the entire network down, security concerns remain, as a successful hack would allow access to not just the data saved at a particular point, but to all data in the digital ledger.