E-Commerce and Information System
Electronic commerce, and more broadly electronic business, has seen amazing growth in the past 15 years. With the introduction of Web browsers that incorporated user friendly graphic interfaces, E-commerce saw the beginning of its amazing growth. While talking about e-commerce and e-business, it is important to understand that there is a difference between the two. E-commerce is the process of exchanging goods and services over an electronic means, most popularly done over the Internet. E-business is the total activities a business engages in over the Internet, this includes e-commerce. Simply e-commerce is a small part of the makeup of e-business. With the CPA firms understanding of e-business, they are able to offer services to companies that spawn from the application of e-business in operation. These three services are design and implementation of software for e-business, integration with legacy accounting systems, and website hosting. CPA firms may retain their independence under certain conditions when they design, implement, or integrate e-business software. Hosting a web site will cause an auditor to lose their independence because outsiders will doubt their independence. The gain in popularity of e-commerce among companies has led to necessary changes in the way that CPA firms conduct audits on these companies. The use of computers has been prominent in accounting for the past 40 years, so CPAs are proficient and experienced in audit electronic data and records. The use of this knowledge lets CPAs to choose to audit around the computer, essentially treating it like a black box. With the advent of better technology, audit tests can be performed in a cheaper and more effective manner than before. These changes have improved the method of auditing through the computer. Even with these improvements the approach to auditing has changed when applied to e-commerce. These changes can be seen in the audit trail, internal controls, audit risk, and
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