Löpande revision och dess inverkan på auktoriserade revisorer : En kvantitativ studie med fokus på revisionsprocess, god revisionssed, riskbedömning & kvalitet i revisionen.

Sammanfattning: In conjunction with the progress of automation and digitalisation in the audit industry, the opportunities for a continuous audit have increased. There are indications that real-time updates of the audit process are becoming more common within the audit profession, which allows auditors to continuously analyse and control the audited company. Today, a clear change can be identified within the industry in the form of a more proactive audit, increased efficiency and more frequent audit and reporting. The purpose of this study is to investigate how certified public accountants in the four leading agencies in the auditing industry are affected by a continuous audit. The investigation is quantitative with a deductive approach. To test our assumptions, a survey was sent to certified public accountants belonging to PwC, KPMG, Ernst & Young and Deloitte. We use surveys to investigate whether implementation of a continuous audit affects the audit process, generally accepted auditing standards, risk assessment and quality in the audit as previous research shows. The results and conclusion of the study show that the quality of the audit has been positively affected by the implementation of a continuous audit. Specifically, the implementation of a continuous audit has improved the auditors' ability to identify essential errors in the client's accounting and reporting. Furthermore, the result indicates that auditors working in an agency, where a continuous audit has been implemented, ensure the quality of financial information in great extent. In addition, the results show that, the audit process and the risk assessment process become more continuous when implementing a continuous audit. A limitation of the study is that the sample only consists of certified public accountants in PwC, KPMG, Ernst & Young and Deloitte. A suggestion for further research is to implement a similar study with a selection of small or medium-sized audit agencies, with the aim of examining differences in relation to the size of the agencies. Another suggestion for further research is to use a qualitative method to gain a deeper insight into how certified public accountants’ reason about a continuous audit.