Computer-Assisted Functions for Auditing XBRL-Related Documents

Abstract

The increasing global adoption of XBRL and its potential to replace traditional formats for business reporting create a need for quality assurance for XBRL-tagged data. Although prior studies have addressed assurance issues on XBRL-related documents (i.e., instance documents and extension taxonomy) and related audit objectives, they primarily focus on the U.S. and, thus, may not be comprehensive enough for use in other countries. Furthermore, no prior literature discusses what and how computer-assisted audit functions can help auditors while they are performing assurance on XBRL-related documents. The main goal of this paper is to introduce computer-assisted audit functions that can be used by auditors to perform audit tasks to attain identified audit objectives. Based on professional guidelines and prior academic studies, this study introduces a set of audit objectives and related audit tasks that auditors might confront if they are asked to provide assurance on XBRL-related documents. The study then demonstrates a set of related computer-assisted audit functions for conducting the audit tasks and discuss how the identified audit objectives could be achieved using these functions.

Keywords: XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), assurance, computer-assisted auditing tools for XBRL