Since 2009, blockchain has served as a potentially transformative information technology expected to be as revolutionary as the Internet. Originally developed as a methodology to record cryptocurrency transactions, blockchain's functionality has evolved into a large number of applications, such as banking, financial markets, insurance, voting systems, leasing contracts, and government service. Despite such advancements, the application of blockchain to accounting and assurance remains under-explored. This paper aims to provide an initial discussion on how blockchain could enable a real-time, verifiable, and transparent accounting ecosystem. Additionally, blockchain has the potential to transform current auditing practices, resulting in a more precise and timely automatic assurance system.

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SYNOPSIS The business use of data analytics is growing rapidly in the accounting environment. Similar to many new systems that involve accounting information, data analytics has fundamentally changed task processes, particularly those tasks that provide inference, prediction, and assurance to decision-makers. Thus, accounting researchers and practitioners must consider data analytics and its impact on accounting practice in their work. This paper uses the organizing principles from Mauldin and Ruchala's (1999) meta-theory of accounting information systems (AIS) to identify current data analytics use, examine how data analytics impacts the accounting environment, and discuss challenges and research opportunities.

Industry 4.0 uses many technologies, such as smart sensors and IoT, to fundamentally improve manufacturing processes. These advanced tools can also be utilized by auditors for the purpose of achieving real-time auditing and monitoring, pushing the profession toward a new generation: “Audit 4.0.” Blockchains and smart contracts should be utilized to overcome new challenges in the transformation toward Audit 4.0. This paper explores the potential of blockchain and smart contracts to reengineer current audit procedures, thereby enabling Audit 4.0. First, this paper demonstrates a framework that summarizes where blockchain and smart contracts should be applied to help implement Audit 4.0. Then, it designs and implements a system to facilitate accountability audit for Chinese government officials regarding air pollution control. In this case, real air quality data are collected via crowdsourcing, verified and analyzed by blockchain and smart contracts to achieve a continuous audit of government officials' performance on air protection.

Each year, governments around the world spend billions of dollars purchasing a wide variety of goods and services. These governments must spend their money wisely in order to eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer dollars. Although government contracting systems are supposed to be transparent, people may still take advantage of these systems to gain benefits, which leads to high-risk contracts and, sometimes, costly government frauds. Recently, governments in some countries have started open data initiatives in order to make government operations more transparent to their citizens. With the open data, a new type of auditor, called an armchair auditor, could play an important role in monitoring government spending. An armchair auditor could be anyone who has an interest in government expenditures and who usually uses technologies to perform analyses on open data. Few studies have discussed how armchair auditors can better use the open data and what data analytics tools could be applied. To that end, this paper proposes a list of audit apps that could assist armchair auditors in analyzing open government procurement data. These apps could help investigate procurement data from different perspectives, such as validating contractor qualification, detecting defective pricing, etc. This paper uses Brazilian federal government procurement contract data to illustrate the functionality of these apps; however, the apps could be applied to open government data in a variety of other nations.

The electric power intelligent inspection robot is equipped with high-definition visible light camera, infrared thermal imager, sound-collecting equipment and other intelligent detection devices and intelligent analysis algorithm software to complete the control loop from rapid acquisition of all-weather data, real-time information transmission, intelligent analysis and early warning to fast decision feedback. Therefore, instead of manual inspection, the automatic detection and intelligent analysis of the state of the power equipment are realized, and the reliability of the operation of the power grid and the power equipment is improved. The use of electric power intelligent inspection robots is an important means to realize the intelligentization of power grids, and is an important direction for the future development of smart grids. Given the current research status and deficiencies at home and abroad, this paper discusses the electric power intelligent inspection robots from aspects of main technologies, cutting-edge technology, functional positioning and standard system, and discusses the research status of electric intelligent inspection robots. On this basis, future research and development direction are put forward. This paper has a guiding role and reference value for the research of electric power intelligent inspection robot.

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