Commentaries on Big Data's Importance for Accounting and Auditing

The commentaries in this forum on Big Data confront one of our profession's most pressing challenges. How should we respond to Big Data? Big Data and business analytics now permeate almost all aspects of major companies' decision making and business strategies. A large U.S. company, for example, might process a billion data elements every day to understand its competitive environment. Moreover, by its very nature, Big Data cannot avoid running head-on into the traditional systems of accounting and auditing that have served our profession so well in the past. What are the threats and opportunities for accounting and auditing generated by this fundamentally different way of understanding information and reporting by business organizations? This issue presents eight commentaries by expert academics and business professionals who have studied and thought much about the core issues and challenges. Collectively, these commentaries not only define and frame the important issues for accounting and auditing but, also, they identify many feasible, yet difficult, pathways forward, wherein Big Data and traditional accounting and auditing might meld to better serve firms, stakeholders, and the public