傳統審計過度依賴人力,不但造成人工審計成本的提高,或是營造審計人員投機的機會(如:美國恩龍事件),更可能會導致以傳統人工方式來稽核現代自動化企業資訊系統的窘境,從而發生導因於電子審計技術不足而產生的審計失敗(CICA and AICPA 1999)因此,本研究嘗試藉由最新的網路商務標準技術,如SOAP, WSDL, UDDI等機制,並參考延伸美國XBRL標準套件內容,訂定出標準可延伸查核語言(XAUL, eXtensible AUditing Language),確立自動化通用審計的系統架構,並發展出「會計師-客戶」間遠距多對多的資料擷取與分析平台雛型。 希望能善用上述資訊技術,促進審計產業的自動化,以防止傳統人工化審計所可能引發的蓄意審計缺失,並可增進電子化環境下的審計效率,節省審計成本,同時可確保會計師專業於變動的企業環境與資本市場中,仍得以維持其公信力與權威性。 具體而言,本研究依序了完成下列成果:(一)定義通用審計系統平台的查核應用範圍,並分析通用審計系統的功能需求;(二)訂定可延伸查核語言;(三)透過網路服務整合技術與XML技術,研發出審計平台;(四)以擬制交易資料為查核目標,應用實作技術設計系統雛型,並展現其成功整合的測試結果。
The traditional human-intensively auditing relies on human experts to complete audit contracts. The approach creates many drawbacks, or even audit failure, in a modern and heavily technology-adopting business environment. First, due to the increasing labor cost and peer competition practice, using pure labor to audit the modern ERP systems is indeed very inefficient and sometimes impossible. Second, human-involving tasks provide opportunities for auditors to commit a “moral-hazard” behavior, like the Enron event. Therefore, our proposal will adopt the newest information technology to create a general and highly-automated auditing system to solve the problems brought by human-auditors. To complete the research objectives, a new XML family member needs to be created, which is the XAUL (eXtensible AUditing Language) package. This package extends the architecture of US XBRL v2.0. Further, the Web Services technology (e.g. SOAP, WSDL and UDDI) will be applied in constructing the scenario of a many-to-many “auditor-client” data exchange and process interoperation. In summary, we assume business can develop their own data retrieval web-services using a unified XAUL schema, and then auditors therefore can develop generalized auditing applications to audit those standard XAUL documents. In our proposed model, the retrieval of audit data can be designed as business services so that the auditor does not have to realize the heterogeneous schema of each client, and can focus on developing more automated audit applications. To demonstrate the feasibility of our XAUL-based proposed model, a prototype platform including the web services environment containing metadata of each auditee system along with their XAUL data, and the auditor’s audit applications are implemented following the proposed architecture.