Towards new data driven methods for financial audits

Recent accounting scandals, for example the Enron (2001) scandal, Petrobras (2014) scandal and the Wirecard (2019) scandal, emphasize the consequences of untrustworthy financial information. Yet, new data driven audit methods are scarce and not yet widely applied in this industry. Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and KPMG, developed a novel data driven method for financial audits. This method derives primary monetary flows from the transaction data of a company that can be used by auditors in financial audits. Recently their research has been published in the prestigious Nature Scientific Reports journal, a leading magazine in the field. New financial audit methods. Despite the growing interest in applying data driven methods in audit and the availability of large volumes of digitally recorded data, audit methods are mostly manual in nature, and developing an algorithmic equivalent proves challenging.