---
title: "Process mining for audit and internal control"
description: "Process mining and robotic process automation appear on only 25 recent papers, mostly in AI and operations research, with 3 in accounting. Event logs from enterprise systems record every step of purchasing, invoicing and payment. Can auditors test whole populations of transactions instead of samples, and what do they find?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/process-mining-for-audit-and-controls
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/process-mining-for-audit-and-controls.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Process mining for audit and internal control: Process mining and robotic process automation appear on only 25 recent papers, mostly in AI and operations research, with 3 in accounting."
date: "2026-10-26"
updated: "2026-10-26"
status: "seed"
tags: ["accounting", "audit", "ai"]
keywords: ["process mining", "robotic process automation"]
---

# Process mining for audit and internal control

Process mining and robotic process automation appear on only 25 recent papers, mostly in AI and operations research, with 3 in accounting. Event logs from enterprise systems record every step of purchasing, invoicing and payment. Can auditors test whole populations of transactions instead of samples, and what do they find?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 25 papers carry a process-mining, robotic-process-automation or business-process keyword (14 in AI journals, 5 in operations research, 3 in accounting): "process mining" on 8, "robotic process automation" on 5, "business process modeling" on 4. Audit firms advertise full-population testing with these tools, but evidence on what it changes is scarce.

## Questions

- When auditors analyse the full event log of the purchase-to-pay process, how many control deviations do they find that sampling would have missed, and how many are real problems?
- Do firms whose auditors use process mining have fewer later restatements or material weaknesses?
- Do automated processes (bots) reduce control deviations, or create new ones that nobody reviews?

## Data that could help

Anonymized enterprise system event logs (public process mining challenge datasets), audit firm data on tool use, and restatements and control weaknesses (Audit Analytics).

## Next step

Apply standard conformance checking to a public purchase-to-pay event log and classify the deviations found by type and likely materiality.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| process mining | 0 | – | 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 2, 0, 0, 2, 1, 1, 1, 0, 3, 0, 2, 4, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 3, 1, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 1, 0 | 39 |
| robotic process automation | 0 | – | 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0 | 13 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Process mining for audit and internal control. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/process-mining-for-audit-and-controls

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-process-mining-for-audit-and-controls,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Process mining for audit and internal control},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/process-mining-for-audit-and-controls}},
  urldate = {2026-10-26},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).