DescriptionIn their monograph “Continuous Assurance (CA) for the Now Economy,” Vasarhelyi et al. (2010) introduce Continuous Risk Monitoring and Assessment (CRMA) as a future area of continuous auditing. CRMA is a CA methodology to monitor an organization’s business risks, identify its uncontrolled significant risks, and prioritize audit and risk management procedures for the timely mitigation of such risks. They argue that development of CRMA procedures is necessary to keep maintain the relevance of CA system in a changing audit risk environment. This dissertation discusses the development of CRMA and proposes a methodology encompassing four components: (1) identification of the entity risks, (2) selection of relevant Key Risk Indicators (KRI, Institute of Operation Risk, 2010), (3) use of relevant KRIs to assess the entity’s risk exposure levels, and (4) prioritization of audit and risk management procedures in real time. This framework will assist the auditor in selecting audit procedures in response to changes in the entity’s business risks, facilitating timelier prevention or mitigation of their adverse effects on the entity’s business operations. Addressing those four components guided the development of the proposed methodology of CRMA. To illustrate the use of KRIs to assess and monitor business risks under the proposed CRMA methodology, we discuss the monitoring and assessment of corporate reputation risk using KRIs. We also present a metric that measures the degree of negative public perception of an organization extracted from current social media platforms (specifically, Twitter) as a KRI to represent the organization’s current reputation level and confirm the occurrence of the organization’s reputational damage. We demonstrate the present KRI by measuring Twitter response to two real risk events: Purina’s lawsuit for selling harmful dog food and Starbucks’ “Race Together” campaign. We analyze the Twitter response mentioning these two risk events and measure the degree of the public’s negative perception embedded in them by using the present KRI. We discuss our methods used to perform this analysis and present the results.