Technology-based Practical Blockchain System Audit Maturity Model

Abstract

Information system auditing can reveal the quality of such systems, and standard audit items are crucial elements of system and audit quality. Blockchain technology is currently being applied to various areas including the financial, manufacturing, healthcare, distribution, and public sectors, and an increasing number of systems that apply such technologies are also being developed.The current audit model is insufficient for application in the field, and the auditing of systems applying new technologies, such as blockchain, has not been given sufficient attention. Furthermore, it is difficult to evaluate the relative levels of audited systems using audit results. Existing studies have only examined the auditing of systems that apply blockchain. Although the Korea Association of Information Systems Audit has suggested a checklist for systems applying blockchain, it has yet to be adopted. To address this problem, 50 existing audit result reports and technical data were collected, from which sixteen factors of four audit quality properties consisting of blockchain system, technology compliance, software quality, and document were derived. Furthermore, an audit maturity model was presented after evaluating the priorities of the 16 derived factors. The results of the evaluation of the priorities of audit items indicated that auditors give a higher importance to technology-based than document-based audits of information systems. This study contributes to the literature by deriving field-oriented audit items including blockchain technology, thus enabling practical audits to be conducted in a short time. Further, this study enables the maturity of systems to be compared based on audit results by presenting audit maturity.