Implementing Triple Entry Accounting as an Audit Tool—An Extension to Modern Accounting Systems

Torje Vingen Sunde () and Craig S. Wright
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Torje Vingen Sunde: Abendum AS, 0566 Oslo, Norway
Craig S. Wright: Computer Science Department, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QJ, UK

JRFM, 2023, vol. 16, issue 11, 1-16

Abstract: Despite the technological leaps modern accounting systems have brought about, fraud is still prevalent. This necessitates spending time and money on audits. Connecting modern accounting ledgers to a public blockchain would make accounting records easily verifiable, aiding the audit evidence gathering and analytics process. Continuous audits will be made viable by readily available audit evidence from the public blockchain. The proposed audit solution creates verifiable “Financial Fingerprints” (signed indexes) for every accounting entry. These Financial Fingerprints are then published to a certain range of addresses on the public blockchain. The objective is to help accounting ledgers be structured in a Triple Entry Accounting format. The third entry can be defined as publishing a notarized index of each accounting entry to the public blockchain. The crux of Triple Entry Accounting is atomicity, meaning there can only be one book. Trying to present an alternative set of books would still be possible, but it would be automatically detected. The method used to achieve the objective can be presented as two value propositions. The first value proposition of Triple Entry Accounting is to define a provable official true set of books. This is important because it is a door into the market without being dependent on network effects. The second value proposition of Triple Entry Accounting is to break down the data silos by using the blockchain as a shared ledger and thus help auditors immensely in their tedious work to gather sufficient and appropriate audit evidence. Because of value proposition number one, Triple Entry Accounting presents standalone value even before the network effect begins. The result of this is an open standardized protocol for implementing Triple Entry Accounting as an extension to modern accounting systems.

Keywords: triple entry accounting; continuous audit; public blockchain; shared ledger; financial fingerprint (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C E F2 F3 G (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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