نظریه کلی استراتژی های به حداقل رساندن هزینه حسابرسی مستمر پایگاه داده ها

The minimization of cost is an important issue in the domain of continuous auditing (CA) research [Pathak Jagdish, Chaouch Ben, Sriram Ram, 2005. Minimizing cost of continuous audit: Counting and time dependent strategies. Journal of Accounting and Public Policy 24(1), 61–75]. This cited study of continuous audit of databases motivated us to work further and provide a general, complete and precise solution. In the present study, we propose an efficient algorithm in terms of long term cost for counting and periodic strategies of continuous auditing as suggested by Pathak et al. study. The improved algorithms contribute to accounting literature in general and continuous audit in particular in the form of general theory proposed for minimizing the cost of CA of databases.

The minimizing the cost of continuous audit (CA) was studied by Pathak et al. (2005), hereafter referred to as PCS, and by Orman (2001). PCS suggest an algorithm for minimizing the cost of continuous audit under more general assumptions than Orman (2001). Also, note that the PCS algorithms involve the solution of a linear inhomogeneous1 difference equation of infinite order. However, the analysis made in PCS is only based on a particular solution and that is an incomplete solution since it ignores the corresponding homogeneous solution. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is to provide a complete and accurate solution in the form of general theory for the problem suggested in the PCS study. We propose to improve the algorithms suggested by PCS and also, relax an assumption concerning the independence of validation time process. Thus, we assume the possible dependence structure among successive transactions. Except for this assumption, the other assumptions are the same as given in PCS. The PCS analytical model identifies the optimal number of transactions after which audit must begin under the counting strategy and the optimal time that must elapse before audit must begin under the periodic strategy. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Sections 2 and 3 contain the proposed models for both the strategies as identified in PCS paper. In both sections, we establish new and complete solutions and present an analytical comparison with respect to the PCS results. We provide a numerical example in Section 4 to illustrate the proposed algorithms. Finally, in Section 5, we conclude our study with contributions.

Our model makes use of the PCS strategies as we believe these to be most practical in real life scenario of online database continuous audit. Our algorithm is based on a general solution of an inhomogeneous difference equation and thus, it generalizes and refines the algorithms given in PCS. The practical interpretation of our results suggests that, with respect to the long run average cost per unit-time, our proposed method provides a significant improvement compared with the PCS algorithm. We offered analytical and computational results for practitioners and the professionals of database audit for practical implementation of our algorithms. The general theory contributes to accounting literature in general and continuous audit in particular. This study also makes significant contribution to the enterprise policy studies in accounting area. Further, the results do not require independence of transactions time validation process.