Modelling Concepts For Process Audits - Empirically Grounded Extension Of BPMN

It is widely acknowledged that a comprehensive understanding of business processes is crucial for an effective and efficient audit of a company’s financial reporting and regulatory compliance, especially in light of the recent major financial scandals. In an attempt to improve the support of business process auditors, we conducted 17 semi-structured expert interviews to obtain deeper insights into their information requirements. We identified six audit concepts suggested by these experts to be graphically represented in process models. Five out of these six audit concepts are already included in existing modeling languages or enterprise modeling approaches. Only Financial Statement Line Items (FSLI) have not yet been considered. For this reason, this paper proposes an empirically grounded BPMN extension for modeling FSLI in business processes.