ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a topic which has profoundly affected auditing research: the links between information and communication technology, particularly Accounting Information Systems (AIS) and auditing. It discusses the advent and subsequent development of continuous auditing (CA), a new approach to monitoring and auditing information, following the transformative impact of the technological advances on business practices. The chapter provides a review of the traditional auditing issues, minor improvements and continuing limitations in the context of the new real-time enterprise systems. It describes the framework of CA and section three explores CA's state of the art, followed by section four which analyzes the impact of the recent phenomenon of big data on CA. The chapter focuses on the development of the continuous monitoring activities, one of CA components. The real-time environment generated by advances in AIS gave birth to the CA process and some implementation experiences of technologies have progressively been prototyped.
