Regulatory supervision with computational audit in international supply chains

Nowadays, as international trade with cross-border logistics increases, the administrative burden of regulatory authorities has been dramatically raised. In order to reduce repetitive and redundant supervisory controls and promote automatic administration procedures, electronic data interchange (EDI)1 and other forms of information sharing are introduced and implemented. Compliance monitoring ensures data quality for information exchange and audit purpose. However, failure to be compliant with various regulations is still a general phenomenon globally among stakeholders in supply chains, leading to more problems such as delay of goods delivery, missing inventory, and security issues. To address these problems, traditional physical auditing methods are widely used but turned out to be time-consuming and costly, especially when multiple stakeholders are involved. Since there is limited empirical research on compliance monitoring for regulatory supervision in international supply chains, we propose a compliance monitoring framework that can be applied with data sharing and analytics. The framework implementation is validated by an extensive case study on customs supervision in the Netherlands using process mining techniques. Practically, both public and private sectors will benefit from our descriptive and prescriptive analytics for audit purposes. Theoretically, our control strategies developed at the operational level facilitates mitigation of risks at root causes.