Le rôle du contrôle interne dans le cadre d'une mission d'audit des comptes annuels: cas des petites entités

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of internal control in the audit of small companies in Belgium. The last reform that has influenced audit standards in Belgium was in 2014 with the adoption of International Standards of Audit. These standards use a risk-based approach in which the understanding of the entity and its environment, including internal control, is one of the most important steps in the audit process. Given the characteristics and limits of internal control in small companies, we carried out many interviews with auditors in order to collect data about the different impacts of these limits on the audit engagement as a whole and on the audit strategy more specifically. The main result of our study indicates that the auditors privilege a substantive audit strategy which is rarely based upon internal control.