4. Conclusion
Continuous auditing is a technological innovation of the traditional audit process. The concept of CA has been around for nearly two decades, however, CA in practice is quite novel. CA innovates and advances the practice of traditional auditing by using technology and automation. Practitioners and academics are now beginning to embrace continuous auditing as an audit methodology to support real time assurance, evidenced by the prototyping and test implementation of CA at large institutions. Furthermore, the development of CA technology and methodology has advanced to a point where practitioners, for innovation, are beginning to collaborate and partner with academic researchers. The above discussions lead to a set of propositions concerning the environment of future assurance: • The continuous audit paradigm (Fig. 2) will progressively integrate and eventually replace the traditional audit paradigm. • Real time continuous auditing will occur in high risk business processes and frequent audits will occur in other business processes. • In the CA environment, information systems will have a lower frequency of errors occurring over a more limited set of sequential processes. • Standardization of data collection and formalization of internal control policies is essential for audit automation.
