Hidden costly audit errors: How are you going to find them?

Did you know that auditor fines issued by the Financial Reporting Council increased by 23% last year, hitting £18million?

Scary figure isn’t it? There could be so many potential hidden and costly errors lurking in your audits but how can you be sure you’ll find them?

Further eye-watering stats come from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and the International Institute of Auditors.

They say that financial loss due to human error or intent is surging - £3trillion at latest estimates. On a yearly basis, £160bn in errors are found in audits. Some 40% of those are discovered because of tip offs or because they were ‘easy’ to see.

If you don’t know how to search for the errors that can occur, the tools didn’t exist until now. The result is undetected errors, falling foul of regulations and ultimately, a hefty fine.

Luckily, we’re moving into a different era and there is a solution – Artificial Intelligence (AI).

How can we help? We’ve teamed up with AI experts MindBridge® Analytics Inc to bring MindBridge AI Auditor to the UK market. Its capable of reviewing 100% of transactions in minutes, producing rich, statistically sound results in minutes, and it identifies commonly made human errors. It also provides ratings to flag up the most severe risks it has found.

If you’ve asked yourself previously: How can I credibly demonstrate that I understand what’s going on in my business? MindBridge AI Auditor is the answer, no matter what size of accountancy practice you have.

There’s no doubt that undertaking audits has become an increasingly onerous task, with an explosion of data which appears to double every 18 months, clients using multiple ERP systems and often having offices in various locations across the country. Practices are also under pressure to deliver audits at lower costs, requiring less effort and staff and to provide a higher level of assurance.

Customers will love the fact that MindBridge AI has a simple, intuitive user interface capable of importing a full general ledger from various sources including CSV, Excel or select cloud accounting packages.

Another great feature is that findings and audit trail details can be exported to an Excel file format and shared with clients, increasing transparency and complying with audit standards.

There’s a lot of talk recently, particularly after the Bank of England’s Chief Economist’s remarks, that many jobs will be lost to automation. Robots will snatch our livelihoods, some fear.

AI won’t replace accountants, we’re sure of that.

But we’re also confident that accountants who use AI will replace those who don’t.

MindBridge AI Auditor is the first solution to launch as part of IRIS AI, a new family of AI based products and services. Look out for more announcements in due course.

Want to learn more? Check out our recent webinar here, book a demo here or give the team a call on 0344 815 5550.