I. INTRODUCTION

Organizations have been subjected to a strong pressure to audit both their financial business processes and other processes of great relevance in the various dimensions associated with organizational performance. In this context, Continuous Auditing appears as an effective tool to provide, in run-time, credibility and reliability to the organizational processes. Continuous Assurance is another concept that emerged as a poweful tool which, using technology, provides compliance of the organizational processes simultaneously with, or shortly after, the occurrence of events of the process under evaluation [1]. However, despite the numerous advantages associated with the implementation of continuous assurance solutions [2, 3], there are few successful implementation cases documented, mostly in recent years, and thus we can say that Continuous Assurance is developing at a very slow pace [4-6]. In Figure 1 we can observe that Continuous Auditing is a crucial element of Continuous Assurance. Continuous Auditing refers to the activities carried out that give credibility to the operations, in addition to allowing more timely control and risk management. Continuous Monitoring (CM) is another element responsible for constantly monitoring and evaluating transactions and their controls, allowing a real-time view of the effectiveness of controls and the integrity of transactions [7]. Figure 1. Continuous Assurance (adapted from [8]) Moreover, we may observe that the audit activities assess whether the management activities are appropriate and effective so that organizations can have a greater degree of certainty regarding the effective operation of controls, risk management and integrity of systems, and the information for decision making [8-10]. Given the advantages that organizations can obtain from the implementation of Continuous Assurance, a faster evolution of research on this topic would be expected. Therefore, as a starting point to understand this slow evolution, we intend to analyze the research evolution of one of its most important component: Continuous Auditing. This paper consists of this introductory section, which presents the motivation of this work; a section that briefly presents the concept of Continuous Auditing; a section that describes the methodology and methods used to conduct the study; a section that analyzes the results of the study; and a final section with some considerations.