Financial Audit Assistance using Misinformation Detection and Explanation
2026-07-20 • Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
AI summaryⓘ
The authors present AI methods to help auditors spot false or misleading information in companies' financial statements like balance sheets and income statements. Their approach uses a large collection of past financial reports and audit results to find patterns of likely misinformation without needing labeled examples. They also provide explanations about which financial variables might be the source of errors, so auditors can investigate further. This system aims to make auditing faster and more accurate by assisting experts with data-driven insights.
Financial StatementsAuditMisinformation DetectionUnsupervised LearningBalance SheetIncome StatementCash Flow StatementCorporate GovernanceAI-assisted AuditingAudit Reports
Authors
Kshitij Madhav Jadhav, Sushodhan Vaishampayan, Manoj Apte, Sachin Pawar, Nitin Ramrakhiyani, Girish Keshav Palshikar
Abstract
Financial statements (FS) such as Balance Sheet (BS), Income Statement (IS) and Cash-flow Statement (CS) summarize the annual financial performance of a company. FS are widely used for evaluating corporate governance, credit appraisal, risk analysis, validate taxation, make investment decisions etc. Financial auditing is a complex and knowledge-intensive discipline whose one important aim is ensuring integrity, accuracy, fairness and absence of material misstatement in the published FS. Given the importance of FS, there are incentives to hide, omit or falsify information to misrepresent the true financial health of the company; e.g., reduce tax liabilities, or increase investor confidence. Given the complex, time-consuming and expertise-dependent nature of auditing, auditors would benefit from an AI-assisted system that automatically detects instances of misinformation in the given FS and identify likely sources of this misinformation in the financial data. In this paper, we present unsupervised techniques to identify misinformation in FS, and also generate explanations as to the financial variables that are likely sources of misinformation. The auditor can then explore in more detail the associated data sources and business processes to validate these suggestions. A crucial feature of our approach is the use of past corpus of FS and associated audit reports to generate insights, which help in providing assistance. We demonstrate the efficacy of these techniques on a large corpus of 11,460 FS over 5 years and associated audit reports. This paper integrates and adds more novel contributions over the previously reported research (Shinde et al., 2022)\cite{SVAP22}, (Vaishampayan et al., 2022)\cite{VSPP22}, (Pawar et al., 2023)\cite{PAPV23}, which we have used as the foundation for our AI-assisted Auditor Assistance system.