Drivers of the Cost of Spreadsheet Audit

TL;DR

This paper investigates the factors influencing the effort required to audit financial spreadsheets, revealing that effort is not correlated with typical physical spreadsheet characteristics.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that spreadsheet audit effort is independent of common physical attributes, challenging assumptions about audit complexity.

Findings

Audit effort uncorrelated with spreadsheet size

Physical characteristics do not predict defect detection effort

Highlights need for alternative audit focus areas

Abstract

A review of 75 formal audit assignments shows that the effort taken to identify defects in financial models taken from the domain of limited recourse (project) finance is uncorrelated with common measures of the physical characteristics of the spreadsheets concerned.