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1. Introduction
In the past several years, the technology of Big Data (BD) has gained remarkably in popularity within a variety of sectors, ranging from business and government to scientific and research fields (Ajana, 2015). The area of accounting and auditing is not an exception, as companies are confronted by an unprecedented level of semi-structured and unstructured massive data, which companies have to use and manage to be innovative, effective and competitive. On one hand, we can see excitement about BD emerging because of the recognition of opportunities in various areas (Marshall et al., 2015; Verma and Bhattacharyya, 2017; Vera-Baquero et al., 2015; Enget et al., 2017). On the other hand, the concept of BD is still confused (for example, social media data or business data) (Connelly et al., 2016; Harford, 2014) and quite vague in terms of the circumstances of use.
According to Wang and Cuthbertson (2015), the potentially important role played by BD and Big Data Analytics (BDA) in innovative auditing practice is evident. Quite a few studies have discussed and analysed broad areas of BD and BDA in external auditing by explaining and providing a context for researchers, drawing their attention to it in terms of general issues (Alles and Gray, 2016; Alles, 2015; Earley, 2015; Wang and Cuthbertson, 2015; Arnaboldi et al., 2017; Connelly et al., 2016) and arguing that the use of BDA is appropriate and valuable to ensure the audit quality (Dubey and Gunasekaran, 2015; Brown-Liburd et al., 2015; Vasarhelyi et al., 2015). BDA may improve the efficiency and effectiveness of financial statement audits (KPMG, 2017; Cao et al., 2015; Yoon et al., 2015; Gepp et al., 2018), but additional competencies and technological capabilities are necessary to implement BDA (KPMG, 2017; Enget et al., 2017; Dubey and Gunasekaran, 2015; Brown-Liburd et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2015; Appelbaum et al., 2017, 2018).
Nonetheless, auditing is lagging behind the other research streams in the use of valuable BDA (Gepp et al., 2018). However, research on understanding the motives for using BDA is limited, as current studies do not attempt to explain why audit companies should actually use BDA. Hence, an external audit is analysed...