The Impact of E-commerce on the Internal Control and on Auditing Practices

The trend that one has verified in Electronic Commerce, assuming the internet as a privileged way for the implementation of inter-organizational communication channels, and also the major development verified in the intra-organizational technological infrastructures (intranets and extranets), have given else to complex commercial partnerships. This complexity has had an enormous impact on what regards internal control systems and auditing practises. An internal control system is composed by a set of control mechanisms thought of according to the risk management connected to business’ processes. These mechanisms play an important role in assuring that electronic commercial transactions are trustful and, so, enabling their increase. The growing importance of Electronic Commerce and the need to assure the necessary trust in electronic commercial transactions, has led the authors to study and propose, using organizational engineering, an internal control system, from an holistic perspective, thus enabling the implementation of real time auditing practises, of the electronic commercial transactions, using the digital agents’ technology. The authors have chosen, on what concerns the organizational aspects, the OEC framework, suggested by the Organizational Engineering Centre of the INESC-INOV, based on the definition of three main concepts (business strategy, business process and information systems), which technically resorts to the creation at a new profile for the UML language. On the other hand, on what concerns the internal control perspective, the authors have chosen the COSO framework (Committee of Sponsoring of the Treadway Commission), named “Enterprise Risk Management Framework”, which approaches the internal control as a process and has a global vision of the organization.