A Comprehensive Review of Factors Limiting Auditors' Adoption of Advanced Audit Data Analytics

SUMMARY Auditors must keep pace with technological developments because they lead to increasingly voluminous, heterogeneous, and fast accumulating data. Advanced audit data analytics (ADA) has emerged as a new type of analytics that has the potential to overcome the challenges that auditors face in the current era of Big Data; however, it has not yet been widely adopted by the auditing profession. This study focuses on these analytics through the means of a structured review and synthesis of the academic literature, based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. It provides insights into data analysis techniques that are described in academic literature and investigates what kinds of challenges auditors encounter when they intend to use advanced ADA and why this is the case. We identify several factors that seem to be particularly important, discuss the potential implications for different stakeholder groups, and suggest potential pathways for future research. JEL Classifications: M41.