Extranets and XML: The Next Internal Control Challenge

The purpose of this article is to describe the shift of business-to-business trading from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to extranets and to discuss some of the internal con-trol challenges created by extranets and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). This technology raises internal control issues because extranets use the World Wide Web to communicate and because XML is such a powerful and flexible programming language.