SYNOPSIS Big Data is one of the most important developments in management practice today, with McKinsey Global Institute (2011) arguing that it will fundamentally change business. Forbes (2013) states that “the market for Big Data will reach $16.1 billion in 2014, growing 6 times faster than the overall information technology (IT) market.” Given the growing significance of Big Data as a business tool, this paper considers the extent to which Big Data will be embraced by the audit profession and how that usage will evolve over time. I put forward the hypothesis that auditors cannot stray too far from the practices of their clients since their credibility with and respect of those clients are the basis of the value added that they provide. Hence, if Big Data becomes an essential business tool, then inevitably it will have the same impact on auditing, albeit, perhaps later and with a more muted reaction. Analysis also indicates that American and international auditing standards, technological advances, and market forces are some of the facilitators and obstacles that will determine the use of Big Data by auditors and that will shape how that usage will evolve over time.

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The advent of new enabling technologies and the surge in corporate scandals has combined to increase the supply, the demand, and the development of enabling technologies for a new system of continuous assurance and measurement. This paper positions continuous assurance (CA) as a methodology for the analytic monitoring of corporate business processes, taking advantage of the automation and integration of business processes brought about by information technologies. Continuous analytic monitoring-based assurance will change the objectives, timing, processes, tools, and outcomes of the assurance process. The objectives of assurance will expand to encompass a wide set of qualitative and quantitative management reports. The nature of this assurance will be closer to supervisory activities and will involve intensive interchange with more of the firm's stakeholders than just its shareholders. The timing of the audit process will be very close to the event, automated, and will conform to the natural life cycle of the underlying business processes. The processes of assurance will change dramatically to being meta-supervisory in nature, intrusive with the potential of process interruption, and focusing on very different forms of evidential matter than the traditional audit. The tools of the audit will expand considerably with the emergence of major forms of new auditing methods relying heavily on an integrated set of automated information technology (IT) and analytical tools. These will include automatic confirmations (confirmatory extranets), control tags (transparent tagging) tools, continuity equations, and time-series cross-sectional analytics. Finally, the outcomes of the continuous assurance process will entail an expanded set of assurances, evergreen opinions, some future assurances, some improvement on control processes (through incorporating CA tests), and some improved data integrity.

Most research into cost systems has focused on their motivational implications. This paper takes a different approach, by developing a model where two oligopolistic firms strategically select their cost-based transfer prices. Duopoly models frequently assume that firms game on their choice of prices. Product prices, however, are ultimately based on the firms' transfer prices that communicate manufacturing costs to marketing departments. It is for this reason that transfer prices will have a strategic component to them. We derive implications for cost system choice and transfer pricing, including showing that firms may cross subsidize their products---a result consistent with the empirical evidence.transfer pricing, full cost allocation, incentives, costing

In the almost twenty years since Vasarhelyi and Halper (1991) reported on their pioneering implementation of what has come to be known as Continuous Auditing (CA), the concept has increasingly moved from theory into practice. A 2006 survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that half of all responding firms use some sort of CA techniques, and the majority of the rest plan to do so in the near future. CA not only has an increasing impact on auditing practice, but is also one of the rare instances in which such a significant change was led by the researchers. In this paper we survey the state of CA after two decades of research into continuous auditing theory and practice, and draw out the lessons learned by us in recent pilot CA projects at two major firms, to examine where this unique partnership between academics and auditors will take CA in the future.

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Audit practitioners have been progressively adopting communications and analytic technology to extend the scope, change the timing, and reduce the costs of audit processes. These efforts have been mainly ad hoc, lacking an integrative theoretical positioning. This paper redefines the concept of the “remote audit” as the process by which internal auditors couple information and communication technology (ICT) with analytical procedures to gather electronic evidence, interact with the auditee, and report on the accuracy of financial data and internal controls, independent of the physical location of the auditor. Building on research on virtual teams and an analysis of internal audit activities, we present a research framework identifying areas where ICT and automated audit analytics enable auditors to work remotely, reduce travel costs and latency, and increase efficiency and coverage.