Blockchain Technology: Shaping the Future of the Accountancy Profession

blockchain in accounting

The agile design managerial accounting definition of Deloitte COINIA also means it can be used today not only for crypto assets but also for a broader base of digital assets, and beyond, as they are supported by the business community in the future. These can include supply chain tracking, digital rights management, real estate title transfer, and other forms of real-world asset digitalization. Deloitte COINIA is an extension of Deloitte’s award-winning Cortex platform, a cloud-based data platform that harnesses the power of data by securely and seamlessly integrating data acquisition with data preparation and analytics. It combines advanced technology with business processes to generate meaningful and valuable insights in a repeatable and consistent fashion.

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The model also supplies a list of articles that most strongly “belong” to each topic. Massaro how to calculate a trade discount et al. (2016, p. 2) characterise an SLR as “a method for studying a corpus of scholarly literature, to develop insights, critical reflections, future research paths and research questions”. Inside each block header, the Merkle root represents a summary of all the transactions included in the block in the form of a hash.

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blockchain in accounting

The public set represents virtually irrefutable evidence of the underlying transactions. It is important to note that organizations can control access to the data, both in terms of who can access the data and what data can be accessed. This study’s analysis combined a structured literature review with citation analysis, topic modelling using a machine learning approach and a manual review of selected articles. The corpus comprised 153 academic papers from two ranked journal lists, the Association of Business Schools (ABS) and the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC), and from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

Teams, management and government bodies implementing blockchain and making decisions based on data obtained from blockchain will also need new skills to adapt to the changing environment (Pimentel et al., 2019; Siew et al., 2020). Therefore, we propose that universities and higher education institutions should change and improve the curriculum of accounting and finance programmes to help students develop the above-mentioned skills. It is essential to start making the changes now as current students will soon become accounting and auditing practitioners as well as managers working with blockchain and other disruptive technologies. The challenges of blockchain regarding sustainability and environmental issues should also be a focus in future research. On the one hand, a distributed carbon ledger system based on blockchain technology will not only strengthen the corporate accounting system for carbon asset management but also will fit within existing market-based emissions trading schemes (Tang and Tang, 2019). Blockchain will help integrate national emission trading schemes and corporate carbon asset management into a single synthesised mechanism, making it possible to analyse the overall efficiency of carbon trading markets in some great amount of detail.

  1. Although “new skills for teams” began to attract attention in 2019, papers on this topic still only account for a small portion of the sample.
  2. All this will help to improve transparency further and decrease information asymmetry in the market.
  3. The dilemma of adopting blockchain in accounting and auditing is in finding the right trade-off between information confidentiality and transparency.
  4. Analysing the role of blockchain in changing business models in different industries is sure to be a topic of great interest to researchers (Johannessen, 2013).

Blockchain Technology in Financial Accounting: Enhancing Transparency, Security, and ESG Reporting

Opportunities range from improved efficiency, transparency and trust to the high potential of new business models and ecosystems that evolve due to blockchain. Challenges include potential risks related to blockchain implementation, the influence of context and a high demand for energy consumption. In machine learning, there are many different text mining techniques, each designed to suit different types of data and different end purposes (see Wanner et al., 2014 for a comprehensive review). We used a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, which is well-suited to providing a systematic and non-biased method of investigating a body of literature (Cai et al., 2019; El-Haj et al., 2019; Black et al., 2020; Bentley et al., 2018; Fligstein et al., 2017). El-Haj et al. (2019, p. 266) explain that LDA leads to “wider generalizability, greater objectivity, improved replicability, enhanced statistical power, and scope for identifying ‘hidden’ linguistic features”.

The promise of this powerful combination is not just a game changer for the audit world, but also advantages and disadvantages of just-in-time inventory chron com a benefit for organizations and a boost to investor confidence overall. Researchers should analyse how blockchain ecosystems evolve and are applied (Benjaafar et al., 2018). Blockchain enables real-time, verifiable and transparent accounting, making it reasonable to assume that accounting information systems will become ecosystems. In a data ecosystem that progressively integrates a nearly infinite set of initially disconnected data, the ability to integrate coherently and apply software agents will be of high importance. With an almost infinite supply of new data, novel methods of measuring business performance will inevitably emerge (Cho et al., 2019). Understanding how blockchain distributes the power of transaction verification and how data are stored and managed to prevent any unauthorised data changes in ecosystems are also key questions in need of investigation.

For example, artificial intelligence (AI) can drive down the cost of health care by more accurately determining correct drug dosages for patients and potentially reducing errors. It can also assist doctors with preliminary diagnoses of conditions such as skin cancers and help hospitals reduce wait times. (2018), “Designing confidentiality-preserving blockchain-based transaction processing systems”, International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, Vol. (2019), “Implementation of blockchain technology in accounting sphere”, Academy of Accounting and Financial Studies Journal, Vol.

In the future, the implementation of blockchain may also raise questions related to the regulation of social and environmental accounting that becomes possible with this technology. All this will help to improve transparency further and decrease information asymmetry in the market. The same approach to external auditing appliesto internal auditors whose main duty is to provideassurance and consultation to improve theprocesses of governance, risk management andcontrol systems. The same procedures executedby external auditors can be executed by internalauditors when completing a financial audit.

Some say that they fit in with the existing accounting standards, while others state there is a need to develop a new regulatory framework that will decrease the probability of fraud (Auer, 2019; Pimentel et al., 2019). For example, there is a high demand for developing regulations for ICOs, cryptoassets that do not offer investors concrete products or services but provide an opportunity for capital gains from reselling cryptocurrencies in the future (Zhang et al., 2021). In December 2017, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton stated that ICOs are vulnerable to fraud and manipulation because there is less investor protection than in the stock market (Clayton, 2017). Implementing blockchain may benefit most accountants and auditors, but it may be negatively perceived by those who work in the black economy, those who are keen on earnings management, and those who need to manipulate the appearance of illicit transactions. Therefore, we assume that automating data collection and storage using blockchain will not mean the auditing profession disappears.

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