JASP for Audit: Bayesian Tools for the Auditing Practice

The goal of JfA is to help the auditor perform their statistical analyses and interpret the results correctly. First, JfA guides the user through the standard audit sampling workflow based on the type of data and audit question and automatically selects the appropriate statistical techniques compliant with the International Standards on Auditing (International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB), 2018). Second, JfA supports audit documentation by generating a report containing the results and the statistical interpretation of these results.
Finally, in addition to standard frequentist methods JfA enables the use of Bayesian techniques, which were previously not readily available in an audit context. JfA may be used by audit researchers, practitioners, and students, interested in statistical auditing. It has already been used in undergraduate courses on statistical auditing to provide support for course material and to explain Bayesian inference in auditing. Furthermore, JfA is being used to research how Bayesian statistics can be applied in an audit context (Derks et al., 2021). To our knowledge, JfA is the first open-source software that facilitates the use of Bayesian inference in audit research and practice.