Business Administration

Auditing, Corporate Accounting and Controlling

The team of the Chair of Auditing, Corporate Accounting and Controlling comprises Prof. Ludwig Mochty and three research associates. Central to their work is method-assisted research into internal and external accounting and annual reporting using mathematical and statistical techniques (Computational Accounting and Auditing; Business Analytics). The Chair works in close cooperation with major auditing firms, which ensures the empirical relevance of the research questions it addresses and its access to practically relevant analytical data. In an effort to introduce the use of pattern recognition methods in accounting, the researchers developed an innovative network analysis approach. Cause-based deviations analysis is a core element of controlling, but with few exceptions it has hitherto often only been applied systematically to cost accounting. To extend its use to other aspects of controlling and the budgetary accounting and indicator systems associated with them, an approach was developed on the basis of the Taylor series and is now being applied to business valuation questions in a current project. Process mining on SAP is used to analyse internal control systems and assess their risk with stochastic simulation. To make annual audits more efficient, analytical auditing techniques are being developed with the aid of multivariate statistics and machine learning and tested under real conditions. The work in this area is making a scientific contribution to the ongoing development of digital auditing (“Audit 4.0”). A special research project is dedicated to first-digit analysis according to Benford’s Law and its use in connection with digital audits. The focus of the study is on “false positives” occurring when the Benford test is applied to tax-relevant data of small and medium-sized enterprises.