L'expert-comptable en tant qu'expert judiciaire en matière pénale

Abstract

Accounting court expertises are relatively unknown by the general public. Like a phoenix it rises when major financial scandals like the Lernout & Hauspie (2000) case, the Assubel (1988) case or the Fortis (2008) case are revealed, to be forgotten afterwards. In the Lernout & Hauspie case for instance, the management engineered fictitious transactions with the aim of maintaining their price of shares. Currently there is only limited scientific literature on accounting court expertises in general, and even less in criminal cases. In addition accounting court expertises have a reputation for being costly, time-consuming and for slowing up criminal proceedings. This master thesis, entitled "The accountant as court expert in criminal cases", focuses on the practice of accountancy court expertises, tries to take out the topic of the shadow and to compensate at its best the lack of relevant scientific literature. In order to do so, we first provide the reader knowledge about some criminal offences. Secondly we give a detailed explanation of the aspects of a court expertise in criminal cases. Then we try to set up the link between the accounts of the balance sheet and corresponding criminal offences. Thirdly we go deeper into the topic through interviews with examining magistrates, a prosecutor, an insolvency administrator and accounting court experts by comparing their opinions and making links with the theoretical parts of this contribution. Based on a theoretical and practical approach, our findings show that there is no standard approach to an accounting court expertise in criminal cases. In addition we found that there are only few accountants as court experts in criminal proceedings, because of the low remuneration and the slowness of the payments.