While blockchain is still a mystery to many people, Big 4 surveys indicate that blockchain is critical and amongst the top-five strategic priorities for the majority of larger businesses surveyed, and that more than three-quarters of those responding to such executive surveys are actively involved in blockchain themselves. Individually, professional bodies associated with the business reporting supply chain are delivering their own guidance and thought-leadership materials (1). 

The Canadian Public Accountability Board (CPAB) back in November 2019 published inspection insights on Auditing in the Crypto-Asset Sector. It highlighted 48 Canadian reporting issuers with activities in the crypto-asset sector, and noted auditors didn’t understand what the risks were, relied on information without understanding its reliability, and didn’t get sufficient audit evidence to support their conclusions. (1)

Decentralized ID and Decentralized Identifier Methods

A U.S.-based CPA Firm started late last year to provide signed, on-demand, real-time independent accountant’s reports for examination-level (reasonable assurance) attestation of the conformance of certain of its clients’ reports in accordance with specific measurement and disclosure criteria. From a specialized website, anyone can click to download the related PDF report incorporating both the client’s report and the auditor’s report, both automatically generated on-the-spot.

That was a mouthful; one thing to pull out of this is that this CPA Firm is having its technology, not a person, sign an auditor’s report. No partner is sitting there to authorize the reports that are customized for the moment the requestor clicks for a report.

Broadly, this raises a litany of issues:

Are we ready to move forward if we will never return to the way things have always been done?

Does every financial professional need programming skills? Some would say yes.

With the release in 2015 of the second series of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) Audit Data Standards, the AICPA asked the question, “Should Accounting Students Learn to Code?” (1) The question, related to new or existing CPAs/CAs, keeps coming up – from the CPA Canada (2), ICAEW (3), and others. 

There’s more to include in our analyses these days than the numbers on the report. With increasing structured legal requirements, Inline XBRL meshing visual reporting with invisible XBRL metadata, AI models and the interpretations, pulling together all of the pieces requires a new way of thinking.