Using Consumer Tweets to Improve Revenue Risk Assessments in Consumer-Oriented Industries

This article summarizes the study of Rozario, Vasarhelyi, and Wang (2022), which examines the use of consumer tweets in improving the prediction and error detection performance of preliminary analytical procedures for the revenue account for firms that belong to consumer-oriented industries. They find that consumer tweets about product or brand interest increase the prediction and error detection ability of analytical procedures compared to analytical procedures that do not include it. These results suggest that this new source of external nonfinancial information is incrementally informative to auditors in developing assessments for the risk of misstated revenue in the planning stage of the audit. The findings of this study have important implications that may be relevant to the audits of other financial statement accounts.