Les nouvelles mesures de rotation interne et externe de la loi belge du 7 décembre 2016 contribuent-elles au renforcement de l'indépendance du commissaire et à une amélioration de la qualité d'audit ?

Abstract

The weaknesses of the international audit world led to failures and instability. The audit partners showed sometimes a lack of independence with their clients and simply closed their eyes when they were in front of irregularities. This type of behavior was one of the reason of the economic crisis we faced during the past few years. Based on those considerations, the European Union (EU) released in 2014 different measures which were incorporated in the Directive 2014/56/EU and the European Regulation 537/2014. The purpose of this European legislation was to implement a complete reform of the audit world and to focus on the most sensible entities which are called Public Interest Entities (PIE). Belgium adopted those recommendations and implemented them in a Law which is referenced as “la loi du 7 décembre 2016 portant organisation de la profession et de la supervision publique des réviseurs d'entreprises”. This Law modifies the prior legislation about the auditor profession and therefore modifies the Belgian Company Code. Among other measures, the Law introduces the concept of external rotation and modifies the previous internal rotation in order to improve both auditor independence and audit quality. Based on those considerations, we consulted different literature in order to set the background of our research thesis. Then we organized meeting with audit partners, with people facing external audit procedures inside PIEs and with experts working for public supervising institutions. Those meetings permitted us to analyze our problematic around six different hypothesis and finally to show our findings about the whole research. Our final conclusion tries to get to a clear-cut opinion and to show the possibilities of improvement.