The Impact of IT Application Control on the quality of the Audit Evidence: An Application Example

In recent years, firms have started to invest millions of dollars on information technologies for a number of reasons, such as managing their operations more effectively, expanding trade channels, and preventing fraudulent activities. Parallel to these investments in IT, financial reporting processes have undergone serious changes. In addition to the creation of all accounting records that have bases on financial statement items with different IT applications, factors such as the expansion and diversification of companies’ operations have made it difficult to audit accounting records with classical methods. In the past, while accounting records were created by people in the classical way, thousands of records could be created automatically very quickly thanks to IT applications. For this reason, the reliability of audit evidence obtained by ignoring IT application controls has become questionable. In this study, first of all, the effect of IT on audit processes and audit evidence has been explained. Then, IT application control tests were applied in a manufacturing enterprise and the effect of the obtained audit evidence on the audit was investigated. Since our paper is one of the first studies to examine the effects of IT practices on audit quality in the literature, it will lead the further studies.