Live from Rutgers WCARS - Friends and Family meeting

Most of you reading this blog post have an awareness and even a keen interest in data analysis and/or continuous auditing, whatever we agree that means. You may not know how long this topic has been being discussed and debated.

I'm writing this from the 23rd (!) World Continuous Auditing Symposium at Rutgers Business School in Newark NJ. It's been a semi-annual meeting, so the group began gathering in 1999. All of the Big 4 firms are here, as are the AICPA, software vendors like ACL, Caseware, Oversight, and even CA. For more information on the agenda, see: http://raw.rutgers.edu/23WCARS .

Beginning tomorrow morning, I'll be blogging about the most interesting speakers, topics, and academic papers on the main agenda, so come back often for updates.

Today is the "Friends and Family" meeting, where some of the longer-standing supporters of the Rutgers program are discussing emerging issues. One topic on the agenda is the notion of Audit Data Standards, which would be a common data model for certain business processes like General Ledger and perhaps subledger like Supply Chain or Revenue.

The presenters advocate a cloud-based data store that public companies would use to load daily or at least monthly transactions, and that external auditors (and perhaps internal auditors) would access that data periodically to perform audit analytics. Glad I'm here - there's a lot of pro's and con's to consider with this standardization.