L'opinion du commissaire face à l'hypothèse de continuité d'exploitation.

Abstract

The economic world has been through some tough times in recent years, showing that the financial health of a company can be confronted with critical situations. Indeed, in today's environment, companies can be impacted by a multitude of factors, whether social, economic or even political. It is then, in the face of these unforeseen events, that the going concern plays a vital role for each company. One of the actors in charge of evaluating the latter is the auditor. As the scope of intervention is very broad, we have focused more on his role as the company auditor. Indeed, in his report on the annual accounts, he is in charge of verifying the going concern assumption, with the aim of enlightening third parties on the fact that, following his report, the company will be able to continue its activity for a reasonable period, of at least one year. The purpose of this research is to present an analysis based on the going concern assumption, to understand the impact that this assumption can have on the work and on the opinion of the auditor when the latter has to give an opinion on the continuity of the audited company. We have looked at it from different angles, through a theoretical research on the going concern assumption and the role of the board of directors and the role of the auditor when a company is in financial difficulties. We also highlighted the methodology we have applied in order to correlate our findings with the auditors experiences through the different interviews. Our research shows that the going concern assessment is mainly based on the auditor's professional judgement. Also, we have highlighted the way incertainty can lessen during the audit and how it can impact the auditor's opinion. The going concern forms the cornerstone of the