Towards Auditors' Preferences on Documentation Formats in Business Process Audits

Abstract

Internal and external auditors play an increasingly important role for building up trust and confidence in today's economic cycle. To ensure effective and efficient audits, current audit standards demand from auditors to gain an indepth understanding of the clients' business processes. In this context, seminal research results indicate that type and number of documentation formats have a significant impact on audit effectiveness and efficiency. However, audit standards do not define type and number of documentation formats and little research attention has been paid to this selection problem with regard to a process modeling support for auditors. To close this gap, we conducted an online survey among auditors with expertise in process auditing. With the answers of 370 participants we derive prevalent preferences on type and number of documentation formats for particular audit concepts and analyze factors influencing the format decision. The results provide a useful basis for developing a domain specific modeling language for process audits which is currently lacking.