The Application of Continuous Audit and Monitoring Methodology : A Government Medication Procurement Case

The continuous audit methodology has presently been adopted by many public and private firms, despite different adoption levels (PwC, 2006; Vasarhelyi et al., 2012). To our knowledge, implementations of continuous audit and monitoring on government procurement analysis are limited, even though wastes and abuses are hard to avoid during the procurement process, and there are usually latencies between the event occurrence and detection works. This study analyzes the medication procurement data of a Brazilian city government and proposes a continuous monitoring and audit methodology. The proposed methodology aims to help internal auditors identify exceptions and anomalies in procurements for investigation. By introducing the comparison of exogenous data, the study further provides cost management opportunities. The methodology also provides insights to armchair auditors to investigate open government data using data analytic tools