Data Mining – A Challenge for Financial Auditors

Author:Univ. Lecturer Ionela-Corina CHERSAN, Ph. D.; Mihai CARP, Ph. D. Sudent; Univ. Prof. Marilena MIRONIUC, Ph. D.

JEL:C88, M15, M42

DOI:

Keywords:audit, data mining, computer assisted audit techniques, generalized audit software

Abstract:
In the last years, the amount and complexity of accounting transactions have increased tremendously. The auditor’s responsibility to audit sufficient amount of transactions require new techniques. The computer assisted auditing tools play an important role in audit work. There is a variety of software available to assist the auditors. The generalized audit software (GAS) is an automated package originally developed in-house by professional auditing firms. GAS allows auditors to examine a company’s data in a predefined format, but not to extract any information from that data especially when such information is unknown or hidden. In the past three decades, database has become common place in business. But, database itself does not directly benefit the company. It is necessary to convert data in useful information. Data mining, known as the process of discovering knowledge from huge databases, facilitate data extraction and data analysis.\r\nIn the recent years, data mining has been studied especially on supporting customer relationship management (CRM) and fraud detection. The purpose of this paper is to identify ways that data mining techniques may be utilized in audit process.\r\n

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