Business Commons^™

Virtual Auditing Agents: The Edgar Agent Challenge, Kay M. Nelson, Alex Kogan, Rajendra P. Srivastava, Miklos Vasarhelyi, Hai Lu

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Intelligent agents can be used as agents of organizational change. This potential exists in the domain of accounting audit, where much of what is currently done manually in batch mode could be done continuously and on-line. We discuss the use of intelligent Internet agents as a way of changing and expanding audit practices in the virtual world. A quality/service framework is presented that suggests ways that accounting firms can evolve in this era of on-line opportunities. The EDGAR Agent is presented as an example of an intelligent Internet agent that gathers financial information. The challenges involved in the development of …