Accounting Horizons American Accounting Association

Vol. 29, No. 2 DOI: 10.2308/acch-51076

2015
pp. 431–438

Big Data as Complementary Audit Evidence

Kyunghee Yoon, Lucas Hoogduin, and Li Zhang

SYNOPSIS: In this paper we argue for the use of Big Data as complementary audit
evidence. We evaluate the applicability of Big Data using the audit evidence criteria
framework and provide cost-benefit analysis for sufficiency, reliability, and relevance
considerations. Critical challenges, including integration with traditional audit evidence,
information transfer issues, and information privacy protection, are discussed and
possible solutions are provided.

Keywords: Big Data; audit evidence.

INTRODUCTION

A
udit evidence is defined as the entire set of information collected and evaluated by
auditors when deciding whether a firm’s financial statements are stated in accordance with
generally accepted accounting principles (SAS No. 106, AICPA 2004). In practice,
external auditors deal with large amounts of information that, although less than the entire set of
possible audit evidence, meet the accepted professional requirement of being ‘‘sufficient and
appropriate’’ (SAS No. 106, AICPA 2004). Audit evidence may be obtained through the
examination of underlying accounting records as well as from other corroborative information
sources such as observations, confirmations from third parties, and any other information that may
provide a reasonable basis for conclusions (Louwers, Ramsey, Sinason, and Strawser 2007).
Auditors are becoming more holistic in their audit risk assessments, examining evidence
available from various sources in order to decrease the probability of material misstatement and
audit failure (Bell, Peecher, and Solomon 2005). This approach has been facilitated by new
technologies that provide auditors with a wider variety of both financial and nonfinancial

Kyunghee Yoon is a Ph.D. student and Li Zhang is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey, Newark, and Lucas Hoogduin is a senior manager with KPMG LLP.

We thank Helen Brown-Liburd, Paul Byrnes, Paul Griffin, Eunice Hung, Hussein Issa, Alexander Kogan, John Peter
Krahel, Brad Tuttle, Miklos Vasarhelyi, Arnold Wright, and anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

The information contained herein is of a general nature and is not intended to address the specific circumstances of any
particular individual or entity.
This article represents the views of the authors only, and does not necessarily represent the views or professional advice
of KPMG LLP or the American Accounting Association.
Submitted: February 2015
Accepted: February 2015
Published Online: February 2015
Corresponding author: Kyunghee Yoon
Email: yoonkhee@rutgers.edu
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information, as well as improved audit efficiency resulting from computerization and audit
automation (Trompeter and Wright 2010).
In the Big Data era, techniques such as pattern recognition, data mining, and natural-language
processing have improved the predictive power of data analysis routines. Accordingly, it is
expected that decisions will be more data driven than experience driven (Lohr 2012). Given this
new reality, we anticipate that by utilizing Big Data, auditors’ efforts to collect sufficient and
appropriate audit evidence can be enhanced. In this paper, we evaluate Big Data as audit evidence
from an evidentiary requirement perspective and provide a cost-benefit analysis for possible
applications. We contend that Big Data is a valuable complement to traditional audit evidence due
to its special characteristics. We will also discuss several challenges to its use during the audit
process. In addition, we will suggest a few related questions for future research.

BIG DATA AND AUDIT EVIDENCE

While there are various ways to define the term ‘‘Big Data,’’ its underlying meaning first relates
to its massive size (Moffitt and Vasarhelyi 2013). In addition to ‘‘big’’ volume, other characteristics
of Big Data include velocity (real-time basis), variety, and veracity (Buhl, Röglinger, Moser, and
Heidemann 2013). Variety refers to different types of data sources, such as Global Positioning
Systems (GPS) measures, blogs, video streams, website traffic, audio files, etc. Different sources
have different formats, and the data themselves are often unstructured. Veracity is related to
eliminating noise and getting truthful information from Big Data. Sophisticated data-mining
techniques, such as visualization, predictive modeling, association, and clustering, are required to
analyze Big Data effectively. In the business context, Big Data could be analyzed via these
techniques for inventory management and predicting customer sentiment (Waller and Fawcett
2013). It has yet to be researched whether and how external auditors should incorporate Big Data as
part of audit evidence.
Even though professional standards have attempted to codify evidentiary requirements, the
persuasiveness of the collected evidence is a matter of professional judgment (SAS No. 106,
AICPA 2004). According to professional standards, audit evidence needs to be ‘‘sufficient and
appropriate,’’ where ‘‘appropriate’’ refers to ‘‘reliable’’ and ‘‘relevant’’ (SAS No. 106, AICPA 2004).
Big Data contributes to the ‘‘sufficiency’’ requirement because of its volume and the variety of data
provided on a real-time basis (velocity). Because sufficiency depends on the risk of misstatement
and the appropriateness (i.e., reliability and relevance) of the audit evidence collected (SAS No.
106, AICPA 2004), more (less) evidence from Big Data is needed when it has lower (higher)
reliability and relevance. Big Data can be quite reliable because it is often externally generated and
acquired by auditors directly. On the other hand, the noise in Big Data may cause an overload of
false positives, leading to lower reliability. One critical step to using Big Data is to eliminate noise
(veracity) for the audit objective. With regard to relevance, Big Data provides unique and
sometimes more timely evidence than traditional sources. For example, Big Data analytics are
particularly useful for audit objectives related to customers (Russom 2011).
The evidentiary requirements provide a framework to assess the usefulness of Big Data as audit
evidence. In the following section, we examine the specific applications of Big Data as audit
evidence and discuss the main costs and benefits.

Big Data as Audit Evidence: Sufficiency Consideration

Theoretically, auditors should have access to all necessary company information (Dunn 1996).
In reality, the scope and quality of collected audit evidence are affected by technology (i.e., whether
the evidence is in computerized form), cost/benefit constraints, and the social interactions with
clients (Louwers et al. 2007; Bennett and Hatfield 2012). Relevant external Big Data could be a

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complement for a client’s internal information that is not readily available to auditors. For example,
when auditing a manufacturing concern, auditors may request management’s sales forecasts
because they can be used to understand the production volume and inventory levels (Louwers et al.
2007). If managers’ sales forecasts are not available or are of low quality, then auditors could use
text analysis to analyze Big Data from news articles, product discussion forums, and social
networks to better understand the sales trends of the client.
Big Data can offer support when traditional audit evidence is deficient, as might be true in a
case of fraud. Obtaining evidence for fraud is difficult because evidence for components linking to
motivation and rationalization are related to an individual’s lifestyle, conduct, and morality (SAS
No. 99, AICPA 2002), none of which are necessarily observable. Evaluating emails can be
particularly helpful in identifying a person’s motivation and probable rationalization, such as
discontentment for a firm. Holton (2009) has used automated text mining to identify emails of
disgruntled employees for fraud detection.
The major sufficiency-related benefit is the information abundance provided by different forms
of data in massive quantities. The primary cost is the data processing effort necessary to reach a
certain audit assertion. Fortunately, advanced data analytics are available, and these analytical tools
are more powerful for larger data sets and friendly to unstructured data (Russom 2011). Auditors
can also create their own data warehouses to achieve economies of scale among clients to reduce
data processing cost.

Big Data as Audit Evidence: Reliability Consideration

Certain types of Big Data can help assess the reliability of traditional audit evidence. For
example, shipping documents are used to verify shipments, but GPS data provide a more reliable,
tamper-resistant data source for verification. In traditional auditing, documents are inspected
manually to verify business transactions. In the Big Data environment, auditors can use text
analysis techniques, such as clustering, to parse and summarize documents automatically (Dhillon
and Modha 2001). This approach is more efficient and revealing than manual inspection.
Employing nonfinancial information as part of the analytical procedures can provide an
independent benchmark for evaluating financial statements (SAS No. 56, AICPA 1988). In this line,
Big Data from external sources, such as news articles, analyst reports, and government reports,
could offer independent benchmarks to assess both internal and external trends of financial
accounts. Analyzing the level of consumer satisfaction (Ittner and Larcker 1998) or daily weather
(Engle, Granger, Rice, and Weiss 1986; Starr-McCluer 2000) may help to understand the level of
sales. For example, if the reputation of a certain product in social networks is negative but sales of
the product have increased, then auditors could see this inconsistency as a ‘‘red flag.’’
A major source of Big Data’s reliability is that it is extremely difficult to tamper with the data
given their vast size, especially when the data are generated on a real-time basis from external
sources. The major concern is the data quality. The reliability decreases when the noise in Big Data
leads to an overload of false positives. Also, Big Data from social media websites, such as
Twittere, could be biased because their users do not represent the entire customer population
(Tufekci 2013).

Big Data as Audit Evidence: Relevance Consideration

Auditors are required to understand the broad economic environment in which their clients
operate, and analyze their clients’ business risks accordingly (Louwers et al. 2007). The content of
news articles is likely to indicate a firm’s future earnings and stock price prospects (Tetlock 2007;
Tetlock, Saar-Tsechansky, and Macskassy 2008), but traditional audit work is often of an ex post

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nature. Auditors can analyze timely news reports to evaluate their clients’ financial performance
changes and business planning.
Professional standards also require that auditors evaluate the risks related to internal control
weaknesses and fraudulent statements (SAS No. 107, AICPA 2007). Previous literature has
provided various ways to assess client risks (Johnstone 2000), and management disclosures could
be particularly useful for this task. SAS No. 99 (AICPA 2002) points out that ‘‘overly optimistic
press releases or annual report messages’’ are risk factors related to potential fraud. In this vein,
Humpherys, Moffitt, Burns, Burgoon, and Felix (2011) study fraudulent disclosures by analyzing
Management Discussion and Analysis sections. Similarly, Larcker and Zakolyukina (2012) find
that executive use of deceptive language in conference calls can help to identify financial
misstatements. Therefore, text analysis of management disclosures is relevant to assessing the risk
of management fraud.
The nature of e-commerce presents a unique opportunity to use Big Data-based auditing
techniques. There has been a significant shift in the retail industry from brick-and-mortar sales to
Internet sales. Even though e-commerce sales constitute only 6.6 percent of total U.S. retail sales in
the third quarter of 2014, they are growing more rapidly (16.2 percent relative to the third quarter of
2013) than other traditional types of retail sales.1 This trend indicates that auditors will increasingly
be facing clients who have very different types of business processes, prompting the need for
collecting different forms of audit evidence. For example, auditors can compare a client’s website
traffic data to that of competitors with similar customers over the same time period. Any
inconsistency should be identified for special attention, even when the client’s own sales record
shows no problem.
The Big Data approach is relevant because it provides unique and sometimes more timely
evidence compared to the traditional audit approach. The major cost is that the evidence generated
from Big Data mainly suggests association, not causation (Cao, Chychyla, and Stewart 2015). In
the above example, the deceptive language in earnings conference calls does not cause financial
misstatement. It is related to the deceptive behavior of CEOs and CFOs, thereby being associated
with financial misstatement (Larcker and Zakolyukina 2012).

Levels of Audit Evidence

Audit evidence can be categorized into three levels: financial statement, individual account,
and audit objective (Srivastava and Shafer 1992). Audit efficiency could be significantly improved
if audit evidence at the financial statement level is complemented by Big Data related to
misstatement probability, because auditors tend to collect excessive evidence at detailed levels
without analyzing the evidence at the financial statement level thoroughly (Srivastava and Shafer
1992). The evidentiary framework and substantive procedures will be more (less) comprehensive if
estimated misstatement risk is high (low). Text analysis of company disclosures and conference call
transcripts helps auditors estimate the misstatement probability (Humpherys et al. 2011; Larcker
and Zakolyukina 2012). On the individual account and audit objective levels, Big Data analytics
could reduce false positives and identify more important anomalies for further investigation (Issa
and Kogan 2014; Cao et al. 2015). Big Data from news articles, product discussion forums, and
social networks is useful to evaluate sales (individual account level). Radio frequency identification
(RFID) chips have been used to verify the existence of inventory (audit objective level).

1
See: https://www.census.gov/retail/mrts/www/data/pdf/ec_current.pdf for the 2014 third quarter release.

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CRITICAL CHALLENGES
Integration with Traditional Audit Evidence
Integration involves identifying and establishing important relationships among information
from separate sources (Moeckel 1991). In most cases, auditors will obtain both qualitative and
quantitative, or objective and subjective, information (Louwers et al. 2007). Hence, integration of
audit evidence is difficult, but a critical factor in determining the quality of an audit opinion
(Moeckel 1991).
Integrating Big Data with more traditional audit evidence is critical because Big Data is often
unstructured and, specifically, may not have the structure needed by relational databases to uniquely
identify transactions, customers, or products. For example, auditors may use GPS location data to
verify certain transactions. However, matching Big Data information, such as pictures or GPS data,
to traditional accounting records can prove difficult. To successfully incorporate Big Data into the
audit, auditors must find the appropriate ‘‘bridge methods’’ to link the new information and
traditional audit evidence (Vasarhelyi, Kogan, and Tuttle 2015).
Summarization and evaluation of Big Data to integrate with traditional audit evidence presents
other hurdles to providing useful audit evidence. Because of the size and unstructured nature of Big
Data, auditors must have sophisticated techniques to sift and summarize the information, such as
the data-mining and statistical analysis techniques studied in the previous literature (Pang and Lee
2008; Russom 2011). Auditors are less familiar with the many sources of Big Data (compared to
traditional sources), and its audit evidence properties such as sufficiency, reliability, and relevance.
Hence, it is difficult to a priori predict how effective the use of Big Data will be for any specific
purpose. Furthermore, data sources may be correlated (such as social media and third-party news
articles), so the incremental value of a data source may be limited, and the evidence obtained from
multiple sources may be less than the sum of the evidence from each part.
Weighting Big Data could also become an issue. Auditors have the responsibility to collate
different formats of audit evidence from traditional sources. Based on previous experience, auditors
are likely to have their own hierarchical system in place to weight such evidence (Louwers et al.
2007). However, it may not be easy to adhere to the traditional systems for weighting evidence
from Big Data. Big Data commonly does not offer precise information, and sometimes the data
from sources such as news articles may be affected by biases (Vasarhelyi 2008).
Facing these challenges, auditors should weight Big Data evidence under the framework of
evidentiary requirements. That is, auditors must estimate the total amount of audit evidence for each
specific audit objective complying with sufficiency, reliability, and relevance requirements. The
amount of evidence provided by Big Data could be determined based on the pros and cons of Big
Data for each evidentiary requirement, as well as the level of deficiency of traditional audit
evidence. In the belief function framework, the cluster of variables with available belief functions in
the evidential network need to be identified (Srivastava 1995). In order to reduce detection risk,
more weight should be given to the audit evidence generated by Big Data if they provide
disconfirming evidence (Fukukawa and Mock 2012). The answer to the problem of how much Big
Data should be used in an audit engagement may also vary significantly among different industry
types and firm sizes.

Information Transfer
Auditors who specialize in certain industries are often considered to produce higher-quality
audits because of both their in-depth knowledge and greater economies of scale (Balsam, Krishnan,
and Yang 2003; Danos and Eichenseher 1982). Even though the codes of professional conduct
prohibit auditors from disclosing any confidential client information without a client’s specific

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permission (ET Sec. 301, AICPA 1992), the general knowledge and expertise obtained through a
client engagement is transferrable to other engagements. For example, when external auditors
‘‘know’’ general customer responses to the new iPade device, this direct knowledge can be used as
audit evidence for not only Apple Inc.t, but also for others in the same industry.
Consequently, clients who fear information transfer to competitors may actually avoid hiring
specialized auditors (Kwon 1996). While this is not an issue unique to Big Data, it can be
intensified when external auditors endeavor to access a wider scope of internal data sources.
Because there are higher costs in collecting and analyzing Big Data, the economies of scale may
grow. Hence, specialized audit firms may utilize more Big Data as audit evidence than other firms
do, leading to a higher barrier that prevents competitors from entering specialized industries. Clients
who are concerned about spillover of their information may also restrict access to the proprietary
data sources.
To solve the information transfer issue, auditors should formally contract with clients with
regard to the usage of clients’ internal data, such as meeting minutes and website traffic. If one
client’s internal data is used for another client’s auditing task, then the key identifying information
should be deleted or hidden. In general, auditors should only use highly synthesized information
from Big Data for other auditing tasks and limit the access to the original unprocessed data.

Information Privacy
Information privacy, described as ‘‘the ability of the individual to control, personally,
information about one’s self’’ (Stone, Gueutal, Gardner, and McClure 1983), is a significant
challenge to utilizing Big Data as audit evidence. Smith, Milberg, and Burke (1996) discuss the
major concerns individuals have related to information privacy, such as internal and external
unauthorized secondary use. Internal emails could be used to detect fraudulent employee behavior.
However, once external auditors have access to employees’ emails, employees may feel their
information privacy is violated. If auditors can access an even wider scope of information including
GPS data, videos, and audio files, then such concerns will only be heightened.
To alleviate these concerns, auditing firms should cooperate with their clients and inform the
employees in advance that any work-related data sources could be used for audit purposes. They
should also communicate with the employees that work-related data would be used for a particular
audit objective only. The information should be anonymized unless fraud is detected.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

Big Data will play an important role in auditing because it complements traditional evidence
with sufficient, reliable, and relevant information. Big Data will be used to decrease auditors’
dependency on client data and provide an independent benchmark to evaluate internal audit
evidence. The change in the auditing environment brought by Big Data gives auditors unique
opportunities to build up first-mover advantage and achieve economies of scale. In educating
auditors and accounting students, the curriculum should reflect changing audit evidence sources and
ensure more content on advanced data analytics.
However, developing techniques to integrate Big Data with the traditional audit evidence,
dealing with information transfer among clients, and solving information privacy issues are
significant challenges to the use of Big Data. We offer our recommendations in this paper.
However, more research is warranted to tackle the important questions relating to the use of Big
Data to complement audit evidence in areas such as developing standardized data analytics to
retrieve relevant audit evidence from Big Data more efficiently, designing data ‘‘bridge’’ techniques
to integrate Big Data with traditional audit evidence, identifying relevant Big Data sources for firms

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in different industries for auditing purposes, and updating auditing standards to regulate information
transfer and privacy issues.

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