Going concern utlåtande i revisionsberättelsen

In the beginning of the 21th century several successful companies filed for bankruptcy. These bankruptcies have been known as large accounting scandals and the largest scandals did Enron and Worldcom stand for. These bankruptcies arose without any warning signal from the auditors about the companies? financial problems and their inability to continue as a going concern. The bankruptcies damaged the reputation of auditors and broad criticism has developed at the auditors? inability to discover companies? financial problems and their unwillingness to reveal a going concern opinion in the audit report. The going concern assumption developed during the 17th century and it has become one of the most fundamental and important accounting principles when making an annual report. The accounting principle implies that the companies will continue as a going concern in the foreseeable future. The investing publics have questioned whether auditors take enough responsibility for evaluating companies going concern uncertainties for a long time. Their defective confidence is reflected in the expectation gap, which means there are a difference between what the investing publics believes auditors are responsible for and what the auditors believe their responsibilities are. Several researchers have showed that even if auditors find out about companies? financial problems, the auditors might not choose to issue a going concern opinion in the audit report due to predicted costs the opinion might have to both the companies and the auditors. Therefore, the primary purpose of this study is to investigate Swedish companies that have gone bankrupt in the period between 2006-01-01 and 2006-12-31, to see if the auditors have disclose a going concern opinion in the audit report in the companies latest annual report. The study also intend to investigate if there are geographical differences in Sweden, differences between audit firm size, differences between auditor?s competence, and differences between client size according to number of going concern opinions. We have made a quantitative study by collecting data from the companies? annual reports. 354 companies which filed for bankruptcy during 2006 were selected by a systematic choice. In fact, our study found that only 19.8 % of all companies had received a going concern opinion in their latest annual report before they failed for bankruptcy. We made a chi-square test for all variables. These statistical tests did not show any significant correlation between the numbers of going concern opinions and the independent variables. A normal distribution shows that it is only in the geographical division there are a significant difference from the total average value. The average value for ?Norrland? differs significantly from the average value for all the companies that had a going concern opinion in the audit report. But there are percentage differences between all variables that indicates that auditors with a higher competence issue more going concern opinions than auditors with a lower competence, smaller audit firms issue more going concern opinions than ?the big four?, and client companies with a low turnover get more going concern opinions than companies with a medium and high turnover. 

Senaste sökningar:

© 2024 Allauppsatser.se | Nyheter Sidkarta