Comparison and evaluation of organizational transactions for continuous auditing and business compliance

Abstract

This article presents a comparator module which aims to compare, in real time, executions of organizational transactions with patterns of behaviors of these transaction executions, allowing the determination of which execution pattern is being followed by running each transaction. This is according to information received by the internal control mechanisms, which continuously monitors the transaction executions. A possible application using this module was deployed and results were obtained from a case study. The results prove effectiveness of the module, mainly because it is able to assess business compliance and the qualitative risk associated to each transaction execution while it is running, enabling an efficient continuous auditing application. The innovation of this article is ensured by the use of an ontological model to represent organizational transactions, which can be applicable to any type of transaction in any business area in order to audit transactions at a very low level, contrary to what happens in traditional auditing, which occurs at a high level (e.g. compare whether a completed transaction has followed a set of procedures). Besides the conceptualization, this work presents some technical details of development and discussion of results from the case study.