The world’s four largest auditing firms, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers have agreed to join a consortium of 20 Taiwanese banks to pilot-test a blockchain service for auditing interim financial reports of public companies.
A report by CTEE.com said the auditing firms have agreed to conduct a trial run of the blockchain-based service on so-called external confirmations, or the process of acquiring and appraising audit evidence, for a small group publicly-listed companies in Taiwan. The service is expected to expand the financial report to more than 1,400 public companies in China starting next year.
The report identified the some of participating banks in the alliance as Tuyin, Beifu Yin, Cathay World Bank, Taichung Bank, Kaohsiung Silver, Xinguangyin, Yongfeng Silver, Yuanda Yin, Yushan Silver, China Trust, Heku, Yinyin, Huayin, Zhangyin, Shanghai Commercial Bank, Zhaofeng, Taiwan Enterprise Bank, Kaiji, Taixin, as well as their senior executives and their financial research advisory groups. Members of the Corporate Finance Research Advisory Group are also joining, the report added.
Under Taiwan’s current system, auditing firms conduct external confirmation manually when verifying the financial health of publicly-listed companies with third parties.
The blockchain-based platform was developed by Taiwan's Financial Information Service Co. (FISC) in cooperation with the 20 banks in a move to migrate public companies transaction information using the technology, with the banks participating as validators of the data.
It added the adoption of the technology also allows auditing firms to review the transactions of public firms using a verifiable and tamper-proof network of data in a distributed ledger, as well as to streamline and automate the confirmation process.
According to the FISC, the new technology will shrink the confirmation time from a typical two-weeks process to "within a day."
The FISC was created under Taiwan's Ministry of Finance to act as its information technology arm. The agency was later established as an independent body to take charge of both public and private capital.
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