From the abacus to enterprise resource planning: is blockchain the next big accounting tool?

Abstract

PurposeThis study conducts a systematic review using 452 academic and industry articles from an initial set of 60,899 records obtained by 3 databases from 2012 to 2020. The authors compare and contrast blockchains with existing legacy systems. The authors identify existing regulation, accounting standards, guidelines and potential amendments in under-explored areas such as taxation, accounting treatment of crypto-assets/liabilities and detailed auditing procedures. The study aims to highlight the trends, differences and gaps between academic and industry literature. The authors provide a behavioral, social, cultural, organizational, regulatory, ethical, accountability and managerial perspectives of blockchain adoption in accounting. Finally, the study develops two adoption frameworks.Design/methodology/approachThe authors' study follows (Moher et al., 2009) and (Briner and Denyer, 2012) methodology to conduct the systematic review and the steps are mentioned below. The authors construct a final sample of 452 from a preliminary search of three multi-disciplinary databases from 2012 to 2020. First, the authors motivate the review and formulate the research questions. Second, the authors aggregate relevant literature from both industry and academia and implement quality assessments. Third, the authors analyze the literature and construct the final sample of articles. Fourth, the authors conducted textual analysis, keyword frequencies and identify gaps, trends and similarities between academic and industry literature and develop the authors' frameworksFindingsThe authors identify 3 (ABDC, B and A* ranked) journals as publishing top article numbers with the highest article count for 2017 with 96 articles in academia and 2019 for the industry with 21 articles. Second-highest publications for academia occur in 2018 with 77 followed by, whereas in the industry, publications occur in the year 2016 with 16 articles. Two co-authors appear most popular with 103 articles. Word clouds, a mind map and article theme counts are used to identify nine key research clusters: data management, financial applications, sustainability, accounting and auditing, business and industrial, education, governance, privacy/security and disruptive technology.Research limitations/implicationsSystematic reviews can have selection biases mainly due to search and selection criteria distortions when constructing the final sample of articles. The authors address selection bias by refining our search keyword combinations by using different permutations and using keywords from articles already collected. The authors employ three databases and review the reference list of articles collected to add more articles that may have been missed into our sample. In addition, to avoid inconsistent coding of domains/themes and interpretations, the authors carefully review our domain identifications and all our analysis twice independently using two research assistants to obtain the same conclusions.Practical implicationsThe authors' unique contributions include reviewing additional papers, differentiating between industry, academic articles, common trends and gaps in much scattered prior literature. The authors identify existing accounting standards, guidelines, limitations and possible amendments required in future for blockchain adoption in accounting in taxation, accounting treatment of crypto-assets/liabilities and detailed audit procedures. Blockchains are compared with legacy accounting technologies and two frameworks for adoption developed. The authors' results could impact the understanding of existing regulation, accounting standards, future amendments, areas requiring clarity and future collaborative research between academia and industry across multi-disciplines. Practical implications to academics, professional bodies, regulators and industry practitioners exist.Social implicationsThe authors' study identifies significant implications on organizations, environment, culture and society in general. The authors identify that social engagement projects may be easily initiated and implemented with decentralized accounting information systems. Transparency and efficiency would change organization culture, ways accountants and even employees interact with each other and community. Anonymity in blockchains can be used for criminal activities. Coding of negative social dynamics to smart contracts may persist. Transparency of personally identifiable information may place individuals at risk. Regulation and standards would need to identify equity, ethics in blockchains which notwithstanding energy consumption, and could enable environmental protection increasing societal sustainability.Originality/valueTo the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that compares academic and industry literature of 452 articles to identify gaps and similarities from 2012 to 2020 using three multi-disciplinary databases. The authors' study is the first study to in detail existing accounting standards, unclear areas, future amendments for International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) standards on taxation, financial reporting and all aspects of auditing procedures. The authors further categorize prior literature into these key areas and develop two frameworks (DAERPS and DAIS) that are linked to our review results and prior literature. The authors identify the impact of blockchain adoption on key stakeholders, regulation, society, culture, organization, accountability and ethics.