Quelle est la nature de l'impact de la provision de services non-audit par le commissaire sur son indépendance?

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 21st century, financial scandals have been on the rise. At the beginning of this century, we saw the fall of companies so large and powerful that we thought they were invulnerable: Enron (2001) and WorldCom (2002). The independence of the auditor was questioned in both cases. A need was then identified at the global level, that is the need to reform the auditing sector so as to guarantee the independence of the auditor and improve the quality of the audit. The SOX Act was introduced in the United States and a directive accompanied by a regulation appeared in Europe. One of the main measures contained in these regulations is the prohibition for the auditor to provide certain non-audit services when the auditor is also in charge of approving the financial statements. The aim of this master thesis is to carry out an analysis of the literature and to compare it with the opinions of the auditors and the regulations in application. As indicated in the title of this piece of work, the goal is to determine what is the impact of the provision of non-audit services on the independence of the auditor and the quality of the audit when the auditor is also responsible for approving the financial statements. The results of our work reveal that the independence of the auditor as well as the quality of the audit suffer from the provision of non-audit services. However, our survey indicates that the one-to-one rule would be sufficient to limit this impact by minimizing the risk of financial dependence.