We're investing over $2B in technology to combat fraud and improve audits: EY Global CEO

Yahoo Finance's Alexis Christoforous spoke with Carmine Di Sibio, EY Global Chairman & CEO, on improving fraud detection and audits.

Video transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: What steps specifically are you taking to improve the quality of your audits, but also to improve the ability to detect fraud?

CARMINE DI SIBIO: Yeah, so Alexis, first of all, on my record, we did sound the alarm. We probably sounded the alarm too late in 2019, and I wish we had sounded it earlier. But we are taking big steps. Number one, we are training all our auditors more than ever in terms of detecting fraud. And we think that's really important going forward.

We've also changed a few of our processes around what we call client acceptance and client continuance, which is really, how do we evaluate the clients that we work for? And we're using technology much more-- you know, much better right now. We're doing things like social media scraping and so forth to really figure out who we're dealing with on the other side. And that's something that's been helpful as well.

But frankly, what we are doing to strengthen audit overall is really investing in technology, because tomorrow's audit and even today's audit is going to be much more focused on using artificial intelligence, using blockchain, to do a better audit, to do a more wholesome audit. That we've invested and we're going to invest actually over $2 billion on audit quality. A lot of that is around our audit platform. It's a global platform. We call it Canvas. All our audits have done off this platform.

And then we have different pieces that attach onto the platform in terms of artificial intelligence, in terms of data analytics to make sure that we're utilizing all the cutting edge technologies today. This has all been put in the cloud so we can make changes to it pretty rapidly. And those investments will help us do a better audit, in addition to continuing to train our people. That is critical here.

We have a big job in the future on training our people not only to audit financials, as you said earlier, but also to audit disclosures and disclosures around ESG, in particular, sustainability. We're going to have to really teach all our people to count dollars, but also count carbon going forward. And it's a great opportunity for us, but it's also a great need for investment going forward.