Impact of IT Auditors’ Involvement in Financial Audits

Abstract

Based on the FBI, the majority of corporate fraud cases involve acounting schemes designed to deceive investors, auditors, and analysts about the true financial condition of a corporation. Investigations have determined that companies manipulated their financial systems to fraudulently inflate financial information. Surprisingly, there is limited relevant research requiring the involvement of information technology auditors in financial audits. According to the literature, information technology auditors are underused (or not used at all) in financial audits, allowing for opportunitites of manipulation, abuse, and/or misreport of financial data. It has been argued that information technology auditors are more likely to effectively understand and test organizations' technology environments than financial auditors. This research investigates whether a relationship exists between inclusion of information technology auditors in financial audits and detecting manipulated financial information in organizations. Results suggest a positive correlation between the above variables, and prompt for additional work to extend the results identified herein.