Question

I will definitely down vote, if essay is inappropriate(Already lost some questions with wrong answer)
15) On what, does future auditing practice should focus ?

Answer 1

The future auditing practice should focus on "Automation". In today's world machines and technology is overtaking manual labour. The same should be the case for the auditing practice as well. Even now, auditing practice involves a lot of manual labour ranging from vouching invoices, preparing synopsis of agreements to manually checking each and every challan for payment of statutory dues. All this manual labour can be cut short by at least 90% with the help of automation which will help in bringing humongous savings in cost and time.

Automation here does not necessarily mean that there will be no human intervention required. After all, automated softwares can only process the data which we input. Also, automated softwares can only provide a summary of the input data. Ultimate analysis of the data in accordance with the relevant laws and regulations applicable to the company is something that has to be done by the auditor manually. Though this might also become possible in the future, it is still a very distant dream. I would like to provide one such example of automation which I have noticed in Price WaterHouse Coopers. PwC has introduced something known as "Robotic Process Automation" wherein they have developed a software known as "BOTs". What BOT does is prepare a summary of all the statutory dues using the challans and the returns. You just need to provide the pdf copies of challans and returns and since they have a standard format, PwC has been able to automize their software to recognize the standard format and provide the result accordingly. Hence instead of manually opening every challan, checking the payment amount, date of payment, whether there is any delay etc., you simply need to input the challans and returns into BOT and they will provide all the details.

Hence in order to conclude, I would like to say that automation can never replace manual labour in auditing completely, but it can bring unimaginable cost effectiveness and efficiency and the auditing practice should definitely focus on this.