Research-Thesis: Analyse de la satisfaction des cabinets d'audit belges au sujet des Shared Service Centers.

Abstract

This thesis tries to understand how much the Belgian auditors are satisfied of their collaboration with their Shared Service Centers (SSC) and what are the key satisfaction factors.

The first part is about defining all the concepts we are going to look at. So, we first define what are the SSC, what are their objectives, how they evolve in time, and so on. We also went through the key principles in auditing like materiality, audit report, independence and audit mission steps. We defined satisfaction through philosophic and scientific approaches. The concept of job satisfaction also has been seen. Now we have all the foundations, we can carry on to the next step: the analysis.

Mixed questions were asked to Belgian auditors through a survey. The objectives were to capture their satisfaction and their recommendations for future improvement. The results were that, mostly Juniors and Seniors are not satisfied nor unsatisfied about the SSC. We then performed a crossed analysis to try interpreting those results. Some filters were also applied to compare the satisfaction of Junior auditors and Seniors. We found out that the Seniors were more satisfied with their collaboration with the SSC.

Some findings confirmed what the literature said. For example, when the standardization is excessive, the quality of the deliverables decreases. We confirmed this with the survey. We finally made some recommendations to the Big Four firms thanks to these results. For instance, we recommend them to train the SSC more on Belgian regulations and fix the language gap with certified English tests.

We concluded by saying that the SSC are accepted by the auditors, the only thing is to improve some points to make the collaboration even more efficient.