Critical analysis of the current state of digitalization of control activities

Abstract

The article offers an extensive critical examination of the current state of digitalization of control activities in the public and corporate sectors against the backdrop of accelerating complexity of business processes and exponential growth of data flows, under which selective and retrospective control procedures lose their practical viability. It is shown that the low level of integration of control functions with digital ecosystems creates gaps in transaction traceability and increases vulnerability to fraudulent schemes, as well as reproduces the implementation paradox: despite the high declared significance of digital control, the actual level of diffusion of continuous auditing and algorithmic tools remains limited. Based on a dataset of corporate reporting and management indicators of companies for 2019–2023, an index of digital maturity of the control environment is proposed, aggregating technological endowment, staff competencies, data integration, and automation of procedures; comparison of groups with different maturity levels demonstrates a structural shift of costs from operating to capital expenditures accompanied by a simultaneous increase in prevented losses and a sharp reduction in error detection time from weeks to hours. The economic interpretation of the results emphasizes the investment leverage of automation: growth in CAPEX is accompanied by a reduction in OPEX and the transition of control from a zone of negative returns to an area of positive return on investment. The analysis of detection accuracy is detailed: algorithmization increases recall and the F-measure while simultaneously increasing false-positive rates, which creates a managerial trade-off between the costs of additional signal verification and the expected damage from missed violations; the key effect is recognized as a multiple reduction in false-negative decisions to levels below 1%. The temporal parameters of implementation are characterized by the highest stochasticity at the integration stage and budget deviations; however, as industrial operation progresses, the process becomes statistically controllable, and the overall dependence of effectiveness on digitalization is described by an S-shaped trajectory with a phase of accelerated growth followed by saturation. The material makes it possible to assess the relevance of the article for substantiating investments in digital control, configuring quality metrics of control algorithms, and planning transformation with consideration of cost barriers, talent shortages, and organizational resistance.