Blockchain and the Future of Accountancy: A Review on Policies and Regulations SpringerLink

Today, and to a greater extent in future years, ledgers managed by private blockchain monopolists can be replaced with public blockchain systems to offer a better choice to enterprise users and allow companies to use blockchains while maintaining complete data privacy. For do dividends go on the balance sheet instance, we do not consider technical, legal or ethical issues, such as the security and privacy of data or the reliability of information entered in the blockchain. Methodologically, the use of the Scopus database does not allow the analysis of a large number of books or book chapters or non-peer-reviewed studies published on the topic of blockchain in accounting. With Deloitte COINIA, hundreds of thousands of addresses can be loaded in bulk for a variety of crypto assets, and Deloitte can see 100 percent of the transactions and reconcile them to clients’ books and records. Deloitte COINIA also assists with off-chain verification of private key ownership by using an innovative, custom-developed workflow to confirm the integrity of a signed message.

Blockchain in accounting practice and research: systematic literature review

This study also involves a comprehensive analysis of selected 80 studies to the difference between bookkeeping and accounting determine which year the most studies were published, the research methodologies they used, and the aspects of accounting that were involved. The number of studies published in international accounting journals has considerably increased. The most commonly used methodology is conceptual; empirical research is rare in the data pool. This study also identifies key and feasible concepts related to blockchain technology, namely triple-entry bookkeeping, smart contracts, continuous auditing, accountability and governance, and accounting and auditing applications.

In the long term, blockchain could increase disintermediation, reducing the power of companies such as Uber, Lyft and Airbnb, which currently create value by ensuring the reliability of their drivers or apartment owners (Rashideh, 2020). To enforce tax compliance in relation to exchanges of cryptocurrencies, authorities could regulate these exchanges in the same way as they do the banking system and give to the central banks law enforcement power (Volosovych and Baraniuk, 2018). The most frequently cited paper in this area is that of Dai and Vasarhelyi (2017), which entered triple-entry bookkeeping into the academic discussion on blockchain and accounting. Their idea comes from Grigg (2005), who proposed a third entry recorded by a trusted third party that stores a receipt to which both parties involved in a transaction agree and digitally sign. To determine which articles should be excluded because of irrelevance, we manually analyzed the titles; abstracts; keywords; and, if necessary, the full text of the articles (Booth et al., 2012, p. 99). To do so, we clustered the articles into the categories shown in Table 1, and we excluded those not pertinent to our research questions that had been erroneously captured by our research string.

1. This study adopted a systematic approach to conduct a literature review to minimize bias and lend scientific value to its results.
2. According to Gan et al. (2021), the critical success factors in this context are the existence of a liquid secondary market, a minimum price-cost ratio of 2, a critical mass condition and the establishment of a maximum number of tokens.
3. We used a thesaurus file to merge similar keywords (e.g. “audit” and “auditing,” “cryptocurrencies” and “cryptocurrency”).

Application of Blockchain Technology in the Integration of Management Accounting and Financial Accounting

For example, natural language processing is already being augmented with machine learning so that a system can be “trained” on legal contracts and documents―which historically auditors have had to read through manually―and can efficiently extract and identify differences in key terms relevant to the audit. Auditing requires the confirmation of transactions and balances on firms’ accounting ledgers at the end of the reporting period due to time-lags, reconciliations, and accounting entries. (2018), “Designing confidentiality-preserving blockchain-based transaction processing systems”, International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, Vol. As indicated in Figure 3 (bibliometric network creating reports overview 2020 of included publications), after some precursors in the years before 2018, in the period immediately following, new publications exploded, gradually creating a new “constellation” of this line of research, in which each publication is connected with others by bibliographic coupling. Bolici et al. (2020) analyze discussions about blockchain and tourism on Twitter. They highlight that the public interest in this specific topic is strong and positive.

This study aims to review the academic literature on the utilization of blockchain in accounting practice and research to identify potential opportunities for further scientific investigation and to provide a framework for how accounting practices are impacted by blockchain. Blockchain is a technology that promises to change the way business is done. Deloitte’s 2019 Global Blockchain Survey found that 53 percent of respondents say blockchain has become a critical priority for their organizations (up 10 points from the prior year), and 83 percent see compelling uses for blockchain.

Blockchain Technology and Its Core Features

Additionally, this study provides potential research questions for future research on blockchain technology in accounting and auditing. New technologies and digital innovations are gradually reshaping the contours of accounting, auditing and reporting (Bonsón and Bednárová, 2019; Dai and Vasarhelyi, 2017; Lombardi and Secundo, 2020; Mancini et al., 2021; Marrone and Hazelton, 2019). Among the emerging technologies able to revolutionize business models and consequently change the processes underlying management control, accounting, auditing and reporting is blockchain (Schmitz and Leoni, 2019). A blockchain is a distributed digital ledger shared by several peers in a network that facilitates transaction recording and property tracking for tangible and intangible assets. Approved transactions take the form of blocks added to a chronological chain of previously validated blocks through the use of cryptographic signatures (Bonsón and Bednárová, 2019).

Monitoring what happens in real time rather than testing (selectively) and reconciling what happened in retrospect is a substantial departure from contemporary audit techniques. (2021), “The disruption of blockchain in auditing – a systematic literature review and an agenda for future research”, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, Vol. Fourth, in our SLR, we underline that the impact of this technology on accountability remains relatively unexplored. In particular, the impact of blockchain on the broader concept of accountability, which includes financial, social and environmental data, is overlooked.

Moreover, Autore et al. (2020) found that a firm announcement regarding its investment in blockchain leads to an increase in its stock price. However, these findings contrast with Austin and Williams (2021), who state that there is no evidence that disclosing information about blockchain investments positively affects investor judgments. The authors in the fourth area engage with empirical evidence and analyses, aiming to test how and why blockchain is implemented. What is clear about the potential disruption this new wave of technologies may bring to centuries-old industries is that it is not just a disruption that will force adaptation; it is also a new opportunity for transforming industries so they are more resilient, effective, and valuable.