XBRL对审计事务所的影响 - xbrl-public

现在XBRL groups讨论组，就XBRL对审计事务所（会计事务所）的影响进行有关讨论。看看人家的讨论对你也许有所启示。

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/xbrl-public/message/6298

The growing requirement for companies to produce financial statements in the XBRL format is now beginning to impact auditing firms. Audit firms need to plan for the coming wave of additional effort required to provide assurance over XBRL documents, and need to be building the cadres of skilled individuals who will provide such support to audit teams. The phase-in periods are quite different by jurisdiction, as is the expected total additional effort.

Audit and assurance firms should be exploring the potential impact and planning exactly when and how they will build the skills and acquire the tools that they will need to provide assurance over XBRL produced by clients.

The potential cost of audit could have a negative impact on market acceptance of XBRL. We must be looking beyond the depth of the pockets of Megaconglomacorp, and understand the impact of XBRL audit on smaller filers and smaller (non-Big-4) audit firms.

The full discussion is here: http://raasconsulting.blogspot.com/2011/07/implications-of-xbrl-on-audit-firms.html

Learn about Megaconglomacorp here: http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2010/07/22

Kind Regards,
Dan
_______________________
Daniel Roberts

E-mail: Daniel.Roberts@...
Skype: daniel.roberts01
www.raas-XBRL.com
Taking the complexity out of compliance with the SEC's XBRL manda

RE: [xbrl-public] Implications of XBRL on Audit firms


Somnath;



I know that you have done some work with XBRL Formula, so I know you understand that at least somewhat. Forget about the processes which are used today to create a financial statement, looking at the possibilities through that lens makes it harder to see the potential. Imagine that you were using a totally different process. Say you were using something like Oracle Disclosure Manager, not sure if you have seen that. Imagine that you could create a process where you could organize all the information required for creating a financial statement not within Word or Excel, but rather in an tool such as Oracle Disclosure Manager. The tool was integrated with an ERP system or accounting system, such as Oracle Disclosure manager is. Other information would have to be entered because it does not exist within the ERP system. Imagine that you could effectively manage all the pieces, kind of like a content management system, but specifically for financial reporting. Imagine that the tool was collaborative, the accountants could log into the tool, the executives reviewing the financials could long in and get their perspective to do their review, the attorneys could log in and do their work, the third party auditors could do a lot of their work either working within that system or attaching their tools to the information sets generated by the ERP system or within the disclosure management (content management) system.



Imagine you could press a button and be 100% certain that every computation was 100% correct, just like you can do today with TurboTax, leveraging XBRL formula to read the relations within an XBRL instance/XBRL taxonomy and verify each and every numeric relation (rather than putting on the green eye shades and doing this work by manually with a calculator).



Imagine you could press a button and execute a disclosure checklist, again powered by XBRL formula, and check the “if this is reported as a line item of a financial, then this must be disclosure” . Clearly you cannot check everything, but you can check a lot.



Imagine that you could automate the checks between what would be in the XBRL instance and reported and what is in the audit schedules which support the XBRL instance financial information, both the internal “closing book” and the auditors work papers, verifying everything ticks, ties, rolls up from the audit schedules and that closing book both of which tie the financial to the details (we called these lead schedules back in the day that I did audits for Price Waterhouse).



Imagine that the auditors could send a software application against all of this audit information, comparing the current period information with prior period information; comparing current period with industry averages and baselines; comparing current period with other sets of information the third party auditors maintain to help look for anomalies; I could go on and on, but I think you might be able to see my point.

In your view, do you think that XBRL would, using this type of approach and leveraging the structured nature of the information rather than fighting the unstructured nature of the information which has been used in the past, make overhead of the creation of a financial report and the audit of a financial report go up (increase, cost more to report and audit) or go down (decrease, a net savings caused by employing technology)?

In my view the question will be how much will reporting and audit overhead go down; one order of magnitude because all this structured information can be leveraged; or two orders of magnitude because there is standardization of audit schedules using XBRL GL BETWEEN the audit firms.



What do you think? Do you think I am overstating the possibilities? What do you think the possibilities are here?



Cheers,



Charlie