The leading journals deal with the topic of technologies and information applied to accounting, auditing and accountability. Starting from these premises, this study aims to offer a bibliometric and open coding analysis of articles published in accounting, auditing and accountability to understand the state of the art, new research trends, future avenues and critique the research dialogue around these issues. It proposes a broader investigation that includes the study of the primary bibliometric data and coding analysis (Dal Mas et al., 2019; Massaro et al., 2016) of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and, because of the novelty of the field, conference proceedings listed on Scopus. Even though we anticipate that blockchain will influence accounting and auditing, we do not assume they will be totally replaced. Most expect that these professions will be augmented rather than fully automated, and the need for accountants and auditors will not disappear (Agnew, 2016; Marrone and Hazelton, 2019).
- In addition, unforeseen add-on tech and services will be needed and created.
- Possible solutions for this issue include establishing conflicting interests between involved parties by design (McAliney and Ang, 2019) or providing digital IDs of real-world objects (Alles and Gray, 2020).
- Some research products have used general frameworks such as the technology–organization–environment framework (Dai and Vasarhelyi, 2017) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (Ferri et al., 2020).
- To become truly an integral part of the financial system, blockchain must be developed, standardised and optimised.
And I think as they understand how to meet the compliance needs related to cryptotax, they’re going to get a better understanding of cryptoassets, the blockchain category. And in some ways this top 10 most meaningful songs will be a tipping point for them to go into some of the other areas that Ron just mentioned. So, to me, I’ll see the uneven evolution, and maybe people aren’t wanting to see Blockchain 101.
What is Blockchain Technology?
This raises sustainability questions and may not be an issue that gets resolved until renewable energy accounts for most of our energy production (Coyne and McMickle, 2017). Three further risks are often raised, each surrounding changing business processes (Canelón et al., 2019; Coyne and McMickle, 2017; Kokina et al., 2017). The first relates to the centralisation of computing power, also called the “51% attack risk”, which can happen when most of the computing power in a blockchain’s network is centralised. In this case, whoever controls that power can, with impunity, discard a valid link in the chain or substitute an invalid block for a valid one. The second risk is transaction malleability, which occurs when an attacker copies a transaction and modifies it to receive tokens (payment) then claims that no tokens were ever received.
Figure 1 shows the distribution over time of the included research products. The blue line includes all 346 research products assessed for discussion. The green line represents all 127 research products that belong to the “Accounting and Auditing” topic. The yellow line depicts articles published in journals ranked as “ACCOUNT” by the ABS AJG2021 journal ranking. Figure 1 shows a considerable increase in interest since 2016, in which year accountants and practitioners began to seriously consider blockchain as an accounting tool (Kokina et al., 2017).
In addition, non-big-sized audit firms place higher importance on data protection, security measures, compliance with audit regulations about BT and integrating blockchain-based accounting in the audit process as the antecedents for effective auditing. Most likely, non-big-sized audit firms need more organizational capabilities to adopt robust security measures to protect blockchain-based accounting data effectively. They also have limited time and personnel to monitor and interpret regulations and standards regarding blockchain usage in accounting and auditing. It is also important to understand all the advantages and disadvantages of joining a public or a private blockchain (O’Leary, 2017).
Moreover, considering keywords and thematic analysis in this field, as shown by Casino et al. (2019) and Xu et al. (2019), our study demonstrates that multidisciplinary research among accounting, business, management, computer science and engineering fields is required. Additionally, 13% of the authors focus on public blockchain, among which Shahriar Rahman et al. (2020)’s contribution is interesting. For authors, a public mechanism based on the global data cloud may exist if there are mechanisms for reporting misconduct by users that undermine other users’ trust. The distribution frequency of the items (Figure 3) indicates the journals dealing with the topic and related issues.
6 Blockchain characteristics
Moreover, Autore et al. (2020) found that a firm announcement regarding its investment in blockchain leads to an increase in its stock price. However, these findings contrast with Austin and Williams (2021), who state that there is no evidence that disclosing information about blockchain investments positively affects investor judgments. The advent of cryptocurrencies has also raised questions about the role of central banks.
Overview of the role of blockchain in accounting
There are still many unknowns with respect to how blockchain will impact the audit and assurance profession, including the speed with which it will do so. Blockchain is already impacting CPA auditors of those organizations using blockchain to record transactions and the rate of adoption is expected to continue to increase. However, in the immediate future, blockchain technology will not replace financial reporting and financial statement auditing.
Blockchain in accounting
The second strand of research is based on verification and possible processes based on public or private blockchain, which companies could use to share audit firms’ audit processes. A distinct research strand looks at intelligent contracts and accounting operations. Besides, the research flow also shows interest in the accounting implications of cryptocurrency.
Also, the results highlighted specific capabilities that audit firms must possess to audit blockchain-based accounting systems effectively. Small-and medium-sized audits require additional organizational capabilities than large-sized audit firms to adopt robust security measures and interpret regulations and standards, given their limited resources and personnel. The information technology systems paradigm argues that the effective use of information technology depends on the availability of specific resources, such as technological infrastructure and technical skills (Balicka, 2023; Afsay et al., 2023).
What is Blockchain Accounting? A Primer for Small Businesses
It will be important to monitor the progress in the take-up of blockchain in the future (Bonsón et al., 2019; Gietzmann and Grossetti, 2019; Bonsón and Bednárová, 2019). More papers applying machine learning techniques will help to gather information from reports, and web crawlers will be able to discover new aspects of how blockchain technologies have been implemented in practice. Combined with manual analysis, these data will help to chart new paths forward for researchers.
The LDA analysis unearthed ten topics, which we needed to find appropriate names for. First, we looked at the terms listed against each topic, then we read the most representative articles for each group identified by the model. One author then developed a descriptive title, which was reviewed and perhaps modified before being approved by the remaining authors. The final topic names are listed in Table 2, along with the 20 most important words for each topic and the marginal distribution of each topic. Ablockchain solution, when combined with appropriate data analytics, could help with the transactional level assertions involved in an audit, and the auditor’s skills would be better spent considering higher-level questions. Blockchain is still relatively new, with the development of software being rather dynamic; however, figure 6 lists and briefly describes some of the products in the marketplace that attempt to integrate blockchain technology.
In financial sectors, in addition to supporting cryptocurrencies, it offers an opportunity for entrepreneurs who want to create value-reducing financial exclusion (Larios-Hernández, 2017). Figure 7 shows a cooccurrence heatmap of the main authors’ keywords (more than five occurrences) in this cluster. Table 4 provides some quantitative data (total citation and CPY) regarding the studies with the highest impact on this topic. Having companies with cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets also presents some auditing issues because there is not a third party and transactions are pseudoanonymous in some cases.
There may be a shift towards notions such as creativity, innovation, holistic thinking, complex decision-making and sense-making. The ability to adapt to keep pace with an increasingly evolving business environment and technological context will also be important. Addressing such changes in education through content and delivery is necessary to ensure that graduates have up-to-date and workplace-relevant knowledge and can keep up with global accreditation standards and professional qualifications (Al-Htaybat et al., 2018).