Distributed ledgers for the prevention of accounting fraud : blockchains between expectations and reality

Abstract: Today, distributed ledger technology as well as its application in various business sectors is on everyone’s lips. The reason for the technology’s prominence can be reduced to its features decentrality, transparency and potential immutability of data stored on the ledger that may enables the elimination or at least alleviation of some of the most important problems in today’s economy. This may also hold for the business activity accounting, whereby a major problem is the conduction of accounting fraud through the deliberate attempt to offset existing internal and external corporate control systems. It is investigated to what extend and through which mechanisms distributed ledger technology actually improves the security of accounting information systems and whether or not distributed ledgers are able to prevent accounting fraud