When Christopher Cox, then chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, was introducing the new XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) regime for financial reporting, he joked that he didn’t want to mention the XBRL term “taxonomy”, because people hate the word “tax”. Indeed, there is an obvious chasm between the worlds of financial statements and tax, and often between financial professionals and tax professionals.
Continuous (external) audit processes wouldn’t be complete without some way to gather enough information about an enterprise’s commitments and contingencies to limit the risks of material misstatement.
I am not individually being successful in countering claims that blockchain will make auditing obsolete. So I’ve decided to try another tack: what will it take for a blockchain ecosystem to develop that is sufficient to be self-auditing? Not saying all these things would be bad, but what are the foundational changes that will make this possible?
How do we assure the use of the word “audit”?
Continuing the series on hopes I had for XBRL: “using technology to make clearer and differentiate the role of the auditor and the role of management.”
Twenty-one years ago, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began the first of a series of “Internet Securities Fraud Sweeps”[1], bringing enforcement actions against individuals and companies across the United States for committing fraud over the Internet and deceiving investors around the world. The SEC’s Cyber Fraud website[2], set up as part of those sweeps and last updated in 2011, sounds as relevant today as it was then – especially when applied to cryptocurrencies.
Continuing the series on changing the business reporting supply chain, and the goals I sought to achieve leveraging XBRL that have not come to fruition during XBRL’s first 20 years, I come to this item from the August 18 blog, “Security methods, including selective encryption, for selective unfolding of single documents to different stakeholders – one version of the truth.”
Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada (CPA Canada), one of the largest national accounting organizations in the world, has chosen to become a founding partner of ThinkTwenty20.
