The “Big Four” auditing firms – Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC – are teaming up with a group of 20 banks in Taiwan in order to test a blockchain solution for auditing public companies' interim financial reports, CoinDesk reported referring to a local news report.
The platform has been developed by Taiwan's Financial Information Service Co (FISC), in collaboration with the 20 banks. FISC was initially founded by Taiwan’s Ministry of Finance as its IT arm, but was later incorporated as a company.
FISC first announced its blockchain initiative in early 2017, along with the partnering banks. It said at the time that it expects to roll out the auditing service to the 1,400 publicly listed companies in the country next year.
Currently, auditing firms have to manually carry out the process of obtaining and assessing audit evidence to verify the authenticity of public companies' financial transactions with third parties. This process, known as “external confirmation,” could be streamlined and automated using blockchain technology, which would allow auditing firms to view the transactions on a tamper-proof ledger in distributed manner. FISC expects the technology to cut the confirmation time from "half a month" to "within a day."
The trial will initially focus on allowing firms to conduct external confirmation for a group of selected publicly listed companies in Taiwan.
