Could the audit profession be in danger of dying out in the coming years? At least one professor thinks that audit (and to be clear we are talking about external audit firms that provide an independent opinion on the integrity of corporate financial statements) could be replaced in the next decade. David Yermack, an accounting professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business says that auditors could be replaced by artificial intelligence and blockchain-based technologies in the near future.
While speaking at a roundtable discussion at NYU, according to a report in Accounting Today, Yermack spoke about how technology reduces the need for auditing in the traditional sense. “The distributed ledger reduces the need for audit by 97 percent,” he said during the discussion. “Auditors in the future will be competing on the basis of productivity, which will essentially mean who has the fastest hardware and software. And fraud, in the classical sense, will be all but impossible.”
