Using Blockchain Technology for Audit Trail
Bilal Alagha, İlker Özçelik · 2025
An audit trail records activities and events that track changes within a system. Maintaining a reliable audit trail prevents fraud, manages data, and ensures control. Recent audit failures highlight the need for more reliable audit trails. Traditional methods face criticism due to their susceptibility to security breaches, inefficiencies, and high costs, which limit their effectiveness in real-time fraud detection. Studies emphasizing financial losses due to fraud underscore the necessity for improved systems. With its decentralized and immutable ledger, blockchain technology presents a promising alternative. It provides a tamper-proof, transparent, and real-time record of transactions, addressing traditional systems’ shortcomings. Blockchain features like immutability, and transparency can enhance audit quality, reduce fraud risks, and improve auditing efficiency. Blockchain-based audit trails outperform traditional systems by leveraging these features to enhance reliability, efficiency, and security. Government agencies and organizations adopt blockchain-based audit trails to create tamper-proof records, ensuring data reliability and availability while reducing fraud and increasing trust in such systems. Audit trails also play a critical role in monitoring online and utility services and evaluating the quality of service provided. This chapter examines blockchain’s potential to address traditional audit trail limitations, providing an overview of both domains and outlining blockchain’s benefits.