Computer Assisted Auditing Tools and Techniques (Caatts) in Smaller Entity Audits

COMPUTER ASSISTED AUDITING TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

(CAATTs) IN SMALLER ENTITY AUDITS

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A Research Paper

Presented to the

Faculty of the

University of San Carlos

Cebu City, Philippines

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In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Bachelor of Science in Accounting Technology

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by

MARY ABIGAIL A. MORALES

October 2014

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In today’s global market place, companies are looking at streamlining their business process through successful deployment of Information Technology. This phenomenon has given impact to audit profession in performing IT audit, financial reports audit and tracing electronic source documents. Because audit firms are now faced with the dramatic changes in the audit climate and increased complexity in audit and financial reporting standards, they’re now turning to Computer-Assisted-Auditing Techniques and Tools (CAATTs). CAATTs are audit technologies that allow IT audit work to be performed efficiently, effectively and reduce audit time. However, little is known about CAATTs adoption by audit firms. Although in large auditing companies Audit Tools to do data extraction and analysis are very common and applied in several contexts, CAATTs’ applicability in smaller audit firms is not clearly emphasized. This paper presents a new approach of framework to investigate the acceptance and applicability of CAATTs in small entity audits. There are gaps that exist in prior literatures which studied CAATTs acceptance and applicability in audit firms as a whole. Consequently, this paper contributes to extend the literature by providing a more precise application of CAATTs specifically in smaller firms. The I-TOE framework is used as the underlying theory, specifically the organizational context which describes the organization measures by organization size. Future experimental...