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Is enhancing audit quality and improving its effectiveness worth the wait?
Audit data analytics can enable firms to enhance audit quality and improve their effectiveness with efficiency. But achieving this can be a long, slow process, says Lesley Meall.
PwC has, for example, invested in a dedicated digital audit team and digital upskilling for all of its auditors, as well as developing some of its own proprietary tech tools. Although these steps will not necessarily be appropriate for other firms, there are ways for auditors in smaller firms to learn from the experiences of the Big Four firms, and from each other.
“There is an opportunity for other firms of all shapes and sizes to benefit from our approach, by considering it when they are thinking about how they (and their auditors) approach technology today, how they may approach it in the future, and how to make the journey,” says Bena.