ABSTRACT
Substantive testing is, however, usually much more expensive than compliance testing. Most records, vouchers and other direct evidence have to be examined in detail, recalculated, reperformed and so on, as distinct from simply looking for signatures, key entries in computer-recorded fields, official stamps, and the like. This has always been one of the arguments in favour of directing effort to systems evaluation and compliance testing: provided one can rely on the evidence of control operation, indirect though it may be, it is far more economic and efficient to gather. The sheer size of modern systems precludes testing the very large samples of transactions upon which direct substantive testing (DST) alone traditionally relied.
