Michael Werner and Jasmin Dayeh present a groundbreaking structured literature review in their article „A Comprehensive Review of Factors Limiting Auditors‘ Adoption of Advanced Audit Data Analytics,“ published in Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory. Using semiautomated NVivo text mining across 431 studies, they pinpoint barriers to advanced ADA techniques such as process mining, neural networks, and Big Data analytics, contrasting these with basic spreadsheet approaches amid surging data complexity. Anchored in the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), their work explains persistent low adoption despite Big Data imperatives in modern audits.
Auditors grapple with exponential data growth from digital transformation, requiring tools surpassing conventional sampling to ensure thoroughness and speed. Advanced ADA enables full population scrutiny, anomaly flagging, and control validation through inferential statistics, machine learning, and text analytics, yet practitioner surveys reveal minimal uptake. Building on Appelbaum et al. (2018), their PRISMA-style methodology yields 61 influential papers, grouping obstacles into UTAUT categories while advocating extensions for regulation and iterative experience loops.
The review distinguishes basic ADA like ratio trends and visualizations (19 to 6 papers) from advanced methods dominating 20 inferential statistics and 15 process mining studies, with publications accelerating post-2000 alongside Big Data’s rise. Effort expectancy proves paramount, driven by computational models creating task complexity (CX), effectiveness skepticism from false positives and negatives (MEO), efficiency drags through outlier floods (ME), and opaque black-box logic. Data input woes compound issues: volume and variety traits (DC), laborious ETL across disparate ERP setups (DCT), plus client hesitancy sharing sensitive records.
Social dynamics perpetuate legacy habits, as veteran teams insist on redundant traditional plus analytic checks despite wasted effort and ambiguous value. Facilitating conditions crumble without robust compute infrastructure investments, viable fee models under time billing, or cross-service collaboration amid silos. Regulation merits UTAUT expansion: ISA 500/520 ambiguity on evidence admissibility (AE), GDPR clashes over data privacy/security (DPS) in nonpublic exchanges.
Stakeholder guidance abounds: training simulations mimicking live complexity for educators and firms; governance-linked incentives beyond financials; ATT-specific regulatory clarifications; XAI exploration, ETL quantification, firm-level meso studies, and small practice tactics for researchers. Gaps call for grounded conceptual work dismantling barriers, UTAUT testing on demographics like age and gender, plus macro factors including competition.
Internal audit executives gain a roadmap to drive ADA uptake, counseling boards on dismantling resistance for fortified data-centric governance resilience. Access Werner and Dayeh’s complete article here.