Structural Analysis of Audit Evidence using Belief Functions

This article performs two types of analysis using Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions for evidential reasoning. The first analysis deals with the impact of the structure of audit evidence on the overall belief at each variable in the network, variables being the account balance to be audited, the related transaction streams, and the associated audit objectives. The second analysis deals with the impact of the relationship (logical "and" and "algebraic relationship") among various variables in the network on the overall belief. For our first analysis, we change the evidential structure from a network to a tree and determine its impact.