Towards a Digitalized Internal Audit: A Systematic Literature Review Based on the Prisma Method

Digitalization is reshaping corporate governance mechanisms, and internal audit in particular, which is widely regarded as an essential tool for mitigating agency problems and improving organizational performance. Yet many questions remain open at the intersection of digitalization, IT governance and internal audit practice. This research explores the effect of digitalization on internal audit practice and the role played by IT governance in this relationship. A systematic literature review was carried out following the PRISMA procedure: starting from 4,758 records drawn from five databases (Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and Google Scholar), inclusion and exclusion criteria narrowed the corpus down to 51 articles. References were managed in Zotero and analysed in NVivo 10. The review shows exponential growth in publications since 2021, driven by the post-COVID-19 acceleration of digitalization, and a concentration of output in a few countries, led by Indonesia and Morocco. Literature reviews and qualitative approaches prevail. The results point to a positive effect of digitalization on internal audit practices, with IT governance acting as the central mediating mechanism, moderated by auditors' digital competencies and by resistance to change. Two persistent gaps emerge: the lack of empirical evidence on the real effects of digitalization on audit performance, and the largely untested mediating role of IT governance. Both call for comparative, longitudinal research using structural equation modelling.