Continuous Audit Agent System

Recently, the provision of the real-time accounting reports over the Internet for the public corporation became popular. In response to this change on the service requirement, audit professionals considered to provide “continuous auditing” to diminish or minimize the lag time of the provision of an audit opinion behind the occurrence of business events. Though has been proposed the concept at 80’s, the provided implementation models of continuous auditing are still far beyond feasible. Major obstacles to hinder wide adoption in industry lie on two issues. (1) The development of continuous auditing system should be independent to the development of client’s information system. (2) The audit procedures that could be implemented by agent base automatic audit system should not be limited to the analysis on corporation internal data. In this paper, an agent base continuous auditing model and system is proposed to tackle these two major concerns. Several kinds of mobile agents are initiated by an audit agency system to simulate the behaviors of a human auditor on the audit procedures to collect various audit evidences. Each kind of mobile agent simulates a specific kind of audit procedure and acts on behalf of a human auditor to access and to inspect audit-related information hosted in the distributed information sources