Open Source Software in Financial Auditing

Abstract

The auditing software is an essential tool to the auditor, being a mechanism that helps to achieve auditing goals to obtain efficiency, quality, and to increase reliability on data analysis and evidence collection. The auditing software can be proprietary software or free and open source software. The purpose of this chapter is to understand which factors affect open source software adoption. To achieve these goals, a survey aimed at financial auditors was carried through, and 64 complete answers were collected. Results indicate that the most used software is the proprietary software and that 43% of the respondents belong to the first stage of open source software assimilation. Additionally, it was verified that the external environment is the macro factor, which positively affects the adoption of open source software in auditing.