Doublethink in governmental accounting: development of an RPA to identify inconsistencies in financial reporting

• Luiz Otavio Schmall dos Santos ^[2] ; Ricardo Lopes Cardoso ^[1] ; Felipe Buchbinder ^[1] ; Miklos Vasarhelyi ^[3]
  1. [1] Fundação Getulio Vargas

     Fundação Getulio Vargas

     Brasil

     
  2. [2] Fundacao Getulio Vargas and Petroleo Brasileiro S/A (Petrobras), Brazil
  3. [3] Rutgers Business School, USA

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• Localización: The International Journal of Digital Accounting Research, ISSN 1577-8517, Vol. 24, Nº. 30, 2024, págs. 1-22
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Aiming to assess the reliability of governmental accounting under an armchair-audit approach, we develop a framework to compare the financial reports submitted by municipalities to two different agencies: the Ministry of Finance and the respective Court of Accounts. We developed a framework using concepts of RPA in conjunction with OCR to download, extract, organize, and finally compare the reliability of the financial reports submitted by the municipalities. The results indicate that a framework of RPA is helpful to automate many tasks necessary to armchair-audit of municipalities financial reports. The results also indicate that many Brazilian municipalities submit inconsistent data to the monitoring agencies, i.e., the Ministry of Finance and respective Court of Accounts. Additionally, our findings suggest that more computerized entities are less prone to present inconsistencies in their accounting data.