The biggest four auditing firms in the world — Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC have joined hands together with 20 Taiwanese banks to pilot blockchain technology for fiscal audits.

According to local new outlet CTEE, the ‘big four’ will cooperate with major banks in Taiwan to test the effectiveness of the blockchain solution. This pilot is basically aiming to streamlining and automating the ‘external confirmation’ process for auditing public companies’ interim financial reports. While the traditional auditing process requires an auditor to manually collect and verify evidence of companies’ transactions with third parties which is quite complex and time consuming.

It was also reported that, if the blockchain based trial is successful, auditing firms will be able to conduct external conformations of public firms.

This system is mainly developed by the Taiwan-based firm Financial Information Service Co. (FISC), which was originally created with the vision of being the Finance Ministry’s IT intelligence unit.

By adopting blockchain technology, more transparency and accountability will be brought to the system and the fiscal audits platform may enable auditing firms to access companies transaction data in a traceable and distributed way. In addition, all the data stored on the platform cannot be tampered with or altered later on as it is powered by blockchain.

The 20 major banks in Taiwan will participate as validators to migrate the transaction data onto the blockchain platform and the ‘big four’ is testing whether it is an appropriate way to secure and automate the confirmation process and significantly reduce the time for their auditing business.

Under the traditional manual methods, the process of auditing and external confirmations normally takes up to 15 days, while the new systerm is expected to complete the whole process “within a day”.

Actually, it is not the first time for FISC to work on a blockchain project. The firm has begun its blockchain exploration journey since January 2017. According to FISC, by launching this trial, it is expected to roll out the auditing service to 1,400 public companies in Taiwan by next year.