Digital assurance and continuous auditing in it governance: A systematic review of technologies, risks, and future directions
Husam Farhat, Aidi Ahmi, Siti Zabedah Saidin · EDPACS · 2026
This study conceptualizes continuous auditing as a digital assurance architecture and systematically reviews its technological mechanisms, governance implications, and implementation contingencies over the last decade. Drawing on 33 peer-reviewed articles published in Scopus and Web of Science, the review combines systematic screening and thematic analysis to examine publication patterns, enabling technologies, theoretical foundations, implementation benefits, persistent barriers, and future research opportunities. The findings show that research on continuous auditing expanded most rapidly between 2016 and 2020, with the United States and China leading in publication output, and that artificial intelligence, blockchain, process automation, and data analytics have become the principal technological drivers of the field. Across the literature, continuous auditing is associated with improved anomaly detection, fraud prevention, compliance monitoring, transparency, and decision support; however, adoption remains constrained by implementation cost, limited IT readiness, data integration challenges, and cultural resistance. The review further shows that system theory, innovation/adoption theory, and control/assurance theory provide the dominant explanatory lenses linking technological mechanisms to governance outcomes. The study offers an integrated view of continuous auditing as an evolving risk and control infrastructure and identifies the need for more empirically grounded research on real-world implementation, cross-context adoption, and scalable digital assurance design.