When audit confronts blockchain
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal
ISSN: 0951-3574
Article publication date: 19 December 2024
Abstract
Purpose
Previous work has explored the ability of auditors to expand successfully into seemingly unrelated fields, referred to as new audit spaces. The present paper focuses on how auditors respond to challenges when entering a new audit field and devising strategies to sensemake and sensegive about those challenges.
Design/methodology/approach
This study builds on findings from 32 interviews with auditors and participant observation of interactions between auditors and blockchainers to understand how auditors approached a new audit space.
Findings
We find that when auditors enter a new audit space, they endeavour to impose a logic of auditability. First, they determine an acceptable knowledge basis for this target audit space by developing a codified set of rules to organize knowledge, then develop a codified set of practices to verify conformity to the auditor’s set of rules. Next, auditors engage in three strategic tactics to influence members of the target audit space: appealing to the financial benefits of adopting a logic of auditability; appealing to their credentials from established audit markets; and appealing to bona fides in the target audit space to establish credibility. We posit that these sensemaking and sensegiving strategies do not take hold in the blockchain space because auditors are approaching these activities from a different mental model than blockchain natives. Because auditors are unable to adopt the mental model of the blockchain space, they are unable to devise strategies to compellingly influence blockchain natives and secure a stronghold in this new audit space. We developed a model for sensemaking and sensegiving when auditors enter new audit spaces.
Originality/value
This paper challenges and contrasts prior accounts of the seemingly unending expansion of audit firms into new spaces. The study demonstrates that there are limitations to auditors’ abilities to transplant their verification skills in the blockchain field.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Emilio Boulianne thanks the KPMG Entrepreneurial Research Studies and the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) for financial support. Crawford Spence thanks the Leverhulme Trust for a Fellowship which provided writing time for this project. The authors thank the participants at the 2024 Canadian Academic Accounting Association Annual Conference, the 2024 European Accounting Association Annual Congress, the 2023 Annual CIRANO-Sam M. Walton Workshop on Networks in Trade and Finance, Université Cote d’Azur, the 2023 International Conference on Digital, Innovation, Financing and Entrepreneurship (DIFE), the 2023 CSEAR France, the 2023 AFC Annual Congress and the 2019 Distributed Ledgers, Distributed Institutions Workshop, London School of Economics.
Citation
Pimentel, E., Boulianne, E. and Spence, C. (2024), "When audit confronts blockchain", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-12-2023-6768
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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