A New Prototype for Intelligent Visual Fraud Detection in Agent-Based Auditing Framework

While US. Sarbanes Oxley act has been viewed by most as an onerous and expensive requirement; it is having a positive impact on driving appropriate levels of investment in IT security, controls, and transactional systems. This paper introduces a new secure solution for auditing and accounting based on artificial intelligence technology. These days, security is a big issue among regulatory firms. Big companies are concerned about their data to be disseminated to their competitors; this high risk prevents them to provide full information to the regulatory firms. This solution not only significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access to the company’s information but also facilitate a framework for controlling the flow of disseminating information in a risk free method. Managing security is performed by a network of mobile agents in a pyramid structure among regulatory organization like securities and exchanges commissions, stock exchanges in top of this pyramid to the companies in the button. Because of security considerations, our strategy is to delegate all fraud detection algorithms to Intelligent Mobile Auditing Agent and web service undertake all inter communicational activity. Web services can follow auditing actives in predefined framework and they can act based on permitted security allowance to auditors. The current solution is designed based on Java-based mobile agents. Such design reaps strong mobility and security benefits. This new prototyped solution could be a framework for strengthening security for future development in this area. An insider trading case study is used to demonstrate and evaluate the approach

Design and Applications of an Intelligent Financial Reporting and Auditing Agent with Net Knowledge (FRAANK)

This paper discusses the use of intelligent Internet agents as essential tools for automating financial analysis functions in the virtual world. Several important characteristic features of intelligent agents are discussed, including autonomy, communication ability, collaboration, and mobility. This paper focuses on developing a new intelligent agent called FRAANK – Financial Reporting and Auditing Agent with Net Knowledge. The prototype of FRAANK described in this paper provides intelligent access to, and processing and integration of rapidly changing financial information available from various sources on the Internet. FRAANK is an example of an agent that provides a value-added service that can be used for extracting data from natural text financial statements and converting them into XBRL-tagged statements, can potentially be utilized in an auditing practice, or used by investors and creditors in making their decisions

Assurance on XBRL Instance Document: A Conceptual Framework of Assertions

XBRL stands for extensible business reporting language. It is an XML based computer language for reporting business information. In December 2008, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC) voted to require public filers to provide a supplemental exhibit of their financial statements (including footnotes) in XBRL, with the top approximately 500 public companies required to comply with this new requirement starting on June 15, 2009, and the phase-in of this requirement for the other filers to be completed on June 15, 2011. The file created using the XRBL language is called an XBRL instance document. Under this requirement, the filers are not required to obtain a third party assurance on the XBRL instance document. The main reason for not requiring a third party independent assurance of XBRL instance documents is to encourage filers to comply with the SEC requirement without incurring much added costs. In addition, to encourage the filers to comply with this requirement, the SEC is not holding filers legally liable of any errors in the filed XBRL instance documents so long as they look similar to the standard reports when viewed using the SEC viewer. Even though the SEC is not currently requiring a third party assurance of the XBRL instance documents of the SEC filings, it is in the best interest of the public that these documents be assured. Although there have been efforts by both the practitioners and academics to investigate issues involved in providing assurance on XBRL documents, these efforts have been focused on the specifics of the assurance process and the difficulties involved in it, and not on developing a framework of assertions. Even the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants recent publication SOP 09-1 provides only an illustrative list of management assertions for handling the XBRL-tagging engagements under the SSAEs as agreed-upon procedures without considering a framework. Without a conceptual framework, the assurance process for XBRL instance document would be ad hoc and inconsistent. This paper develops a set of assertions for providing assurance on XBRL instance documents similar to the management assertions for financial audits. Further, we discuss how such a framework would assist auditors in planning and evaluating such an engagement by collecting appropriate items of evidence pertaining to specific assertions to form an opinion whether the instance document is a true representation of the standard format (i.e., ASCII or HTML) document. We also discuss how the use of new technology would make the assurance process more effective and efficient

Status Quo and Potential of XBRL for Business and Information Systems Engineering

The paper examines the current state of research as regards the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) by using the literature review methodology. The results showthat an empiricalquantitative research design is used most of the time. The contributions vary in substance in terms of research on XBRL and research with XBRL. Research with XBRL focuses on the development of conceptual XBRL extensions. Work on XBRL considers, for example, the changes in reporting as a result of XBRL as well as the acceptance and enforcement of financial reporting standards. The results point to open issues and are relevant for research and practice

Muhasebe bilgi teknolojisinde genişletilebilir işletme raporlama dili (XBRL) ya da genişletilebilir biçimlendirme dili (XML)

İçinde bulunduğumuz çağda bilgisayar teknolojisi oldukça hızlı ve tahmin edilmez bir gelişme göstermektedir. Bilgisayarların hayatımızın hemen her alanında kullanılması lüks olmaktan çok bir ihtiyaç haline gelmiştir. Bilgi teknolojisi (Information Technology - IT) olarak adlandırabileceğimiz bu gelişmeler, işletmelerin internet üzerinden müşterileri ile ilişkiye geçebilmesine, mal ve hizmet pazarlayabilmesine, satış sonrası destek verebilmesine vs. olanak sağladığı gibi; işletme ortaklarına veya yatırımcılara finansal faaliyetleri ile ilgili anında bilgi verebilmesi kolaylığını da getirmiştir. Tüm bu gelişmeler kuşkusuz muhasebe mesleğini de etkilemiştir ve etkilemeye devam etmektedir. Özellikle son yıllarda hızla gelişen genişletilebilir işletme raporlama dili (Extensible Business Reporting Language - XBRL) sürekli bir veri üretimi ortamı oluşturmuş, defter ve belgelerin en az olduğu bir bilgi sistemi kurmuştur. Bu alandaki gelişmeler gelecekte muhasebe mesleğinde her türlü belgenin dijital olacağını göstermiştir. XBRL konusundaki gelişmeler bir tartışmayı da beraberinde getirmiştir. XBRL temel olarak bir genişletilebilir biçimlendirme diline (Extensible Markup Language - XML) bağlı oluşturulmuş bir dille yazılan uygulamalardır. İşletmeler gelecekte paket program olarak kurulabilen XBRL sistemini kullanmayı tercih edebilecekler; aynı zamanda kendilerine özel geliştirilebilen XML tabanlı programları da tercih edebilecektir. Çalışmada, gelecekte muhasebe mesleğinde XBRL’yi kullanmanın yararları ile geliştirilen XML’yi kullanmanın yararları tartışılmaktadır

Analysis of XBRL literature : a decade of progress and puzzle

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting language) was recently, in 2008, in its 10th year. The concept was articulated in 1998 by Charles Hoffman, known as XFRML (eXtensible Financial Reporting Mark Up Language) to facilitate the business reporting process and improve financial reporting. The objective of this paper is to examine a decade (1998-2008) of XBRL articles published in various publications including trade, practitioner and academic journals to identify trends and patterns, milestones, and organizations actively contributed to this development. Another goal is to assess public perceptions of XBRL, its capabilities and its future. We examined published articles where XBRL appeared either in the title or abstract of the article during 1998-2008. Considering that XBRL reporting is being required only in recent years, the research shows various interest groups worked together for a long time to achieve a common goal. The academic community has also been proactive in contributing to and assessing this new reporting standard. There is a trail of research articles to document this contribution. This paper provides various charts and interesting statistics

Continuous auditing technologies and models

Continuous auditing is not a totally new concept, but it has not been widely implemented, and has existed mostly as a point of debate amongst the auditing fraternity. This may soon change, as continuous auditing has become a topic of great interest, especially in the last decade. This may be due to a combination of reasons. In the last decade, much of the confidence in auditors’ reports was lost due to corporate governance scandals. This also brought about a greater desire for faster, more reliable reporting on which to base decisions. This desire has been transposed into regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley act in the United States, which encourages real-time auditing activities, which would benefit from continuous auditing. A second, possible contributing factor to the heightened interest in continuous auditing is that much of the requisite technology has matured to a point where it can be successfully used to implement continuous auditing. It is the technologies which form the focus of this research. It is therefore, the primary objective of this research to investigate and identify the essential technologies, and identify and define their roles within a continuous auditing solution. To explore this area, three models of continuous auditing are compared according to the roles of the technologies within them. The roots of some auditing technologies which can be adapted to the paradigm of continuous auditing are explored, as well as new technologies, such as XML-based reporting languages. In order to fully explore these technologies, the concepts of data integrity and data quality are first defined and discussed, and some security measures which contribute to integrity are identified. An obstacle to implementing a continuous model is that even with the newly available technologies, the multitudes of systems which are used in organisations, produce data in a plethora of data formats. In performing an audit the continuous auditing system needs to first gather this data and then needs to be able to compare “apples with apples”. Therefore, the technologies which can be used to acquire and standardise the data are identified

Implications of XBRL Adoption in Nigeria: Perception of Professional Accountants

XBRL is a recent development in the world of financial reporting. In view of its emerging preeminence in some countries of the world contrasted with the apparent backwardness of most African countries in respect of this move, this study sought to examine the implications of XBRL adoption in Nigeria. Adopting a survey design, mean scores and t-test statistic were employed to compare the perceptions of Nigerian professional accountants on the benefits and challenges of XBRL adoption in Nigeria. All these were based on questionnaire responses elicited from 54 out of the 100 copies of questionnaire generated for the study. The findings of the study, among others, revealed that there were perceptual differences among the respondents on the two issues. It is suggested that professional, national and sponsored international XBRL awareness and training would be of the essence if Nigerian Accountants are to find a space on the global map of professional relevance. Keywords: XBRL, XBRL adoption in Nigeria, Financial Reportin

XBRL and the qualitative characteristics of useful financial statement information

Purpose of the Thesis The purpose of the thesis is to explore, identify, describe and evaluate technological and accounting issues and problems and their potential solutions that are related to the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), together with providing some further research ideas. Research Methods and Data The thesis is conducted as a literature review of scientific journal articles and working papers. XBRL has emerged as a solution to many so-called “wicked” problems related to financial reporting in the Internet, a field where little theoretical understanding can a priori be taken for granted, and where pragmatic problem-solving procedures are needed to develop a solution that can be adopted for general use. The review follows the phases of a constructive Design Research process. Technological and accounting issues are discussed and evaluated at each phase, with the qualitative characteristics of useful financial statement information, relevance and faithful representation as the two fundamental qualitative characteristics and comparability and understandability as the most pertinent of the enhancing qualitative characteristics, used as the main accounting evaluation criteria. Results The results indicate that there still remain many types of significant technical deficiencies in the first officially filed XBRL financial statements. Moreover, XBRL seems to bring in new types of deficiencies, which jeopardize the faithful representation objective of financial statements. Consequently, new types of assurance assertions and procedures are being developed. The flexibility of both accounting standards and XBRL taxonomies seem to lead to severe interoperability and accounting comparability problems, which might be mitigated by for instance adopting strictly template-based accounting standards. Tentative results indicate that XBRL does enhance the usefulness of financial statements by making them more understandable to users, thereby helping them make better investment decisions. The mandatory adoption of XBRL seems to have affected market information conditions in many countries somewhat, but it has not been established yet that XBRL would be affecting the content or relevance of the financial statement information itself. XBRL is viewed by many constituencies as an enabling technology in a longer-term shift from a paper-based to electronic financial reporting paradigm. At present, however, XBRL can be viewed as a regulator-driven infrastructure project, and affordable end-user software will probably be needed for its adoption and acceptance among the investing public. Europe and Finland are lagging behind in introducing XBRL, which may actually help in the end by enabling learning from the mistakes of others

Development of a prototype public file repository for XBRL documents : challenges and opportunities

Within the past few years, companies have begun publishing financial reports in an XML-based open-standard file format called XBRL. Providing easy public access to XBRL formatted data of company disclosures would provide investors, analysts, and accounting researchers the data in a highly flexible and usable format. EDGAR currently provides public access to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's required filings for publicly traded companies. Currently, EDGAR filings must be in either ASCII, HTML, and in some select cases, XML format. Though EDGAR has recently started to provide XBRL formatted data to the public for a limited number of companies, their primary distribution method remains in traditional file formats including plain text files, PDF, and GIF. Regardless of difficulties with XBRL specification versioning and customized taxonomies, XBRL data aggregators have yet to address any simple mechanism to retrieve XBRL documents. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a prototype public file repository for XBRL documents and present challenges and opportunities of having this public file repository. Also, in response to an anticipated demand for XBRL documents for the purpose of more frequent reporting and auditing of financial information, we compare two approaches of public access to XBRL documents on the web: file repository and file registry