REAL-IZING THE BENEFITS OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES AS A SOURCE OF AUDIT EVIDENCE - AN INTERPRETIVE FIELD-STUDY

The development of new audit technologies has been the focus of a grea t deal of attention by both auditing academics and CPA firm administra tors during the past decade. Many resources have been devoted to the d evelopment and scientific validation of sophisticated new technologies with the anticipation that increased audit ''efficiency'', as well as improved ''effectiveness'' and inter-auditor judgment ''consensus'', would result. The primary focus of these efforts, and the related publ ications, have been on the technologies themselves, in the apparent be lief that qualities such as ''efficiency'' exist objectively in the te chnologies. However, essentially no published research exists that has examined the use of these new technologies by audit practitioners. Th e study reported in this paper was conducted as an interpretive field study within several ''Big 6'' CPA firms, with a focus on proprietary audit technologies that had been recently implemented or discontinued. All of the technologies involved new audit approaches, rather than si mply the automation of existing, established approaches to audit evide nce generation and evaluation. The central finding reported in this pa per is that benefits in the form of enhanced audit efficiency did not result directly from the adoption and use of these new technologies. R ather, where they were reported to have occurred, these benefits resul ted from the concomitant reduction or elimination of other audit proce dures that had been performed in the past. Based upon these findings, it is argued that the ''benefits'' of new audit technologies, as a sou rce of audit evidence, do not exist objectively in the technologies th emselves, and that these benefits are nor automatically realized throu gh the adoption and use of the technologies. Rather, the benefits attr ibuted to the technologies are seen to be made real, or ''real-ized'', through actions taken by the auditors concurrent with technology adop tion. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.