Réforme européenne de l'audit : premier bilan qualitatif de l'impact de la supervision publique en Belgique

Abstract

The reform carried out by the European legislator after the 2008 financial crisis disrupted the entire audit market. Indeed, the Directive 2014/56/EU and the Regulation 537/2014 brought about important changes, including more constraining norms to be applied to Public-Interest Entities. The implementation of this legislative modification being relatively recent in Belgium, this master thesis aims at providing a first analysis of the impact of one aspect of the reform in particular: the public oversight of statutory auditors. After laying the foundation of the reform at the European and Belgian levels, a literature review based on the legislator’s intentions regarding the new oversight mechanism has been performed. Do these objectives seem achieved in practice? Multiple interviews with audit partners and experts working for supervisory authorities have also been conducted. These discussions were very helpful to find out more about the concrete implementation of the new oversight system as well as the achievement of the legislator’s objectives. Finally, the future of the profession has also been considered. Suggestions to further improve audit quality are indeed presented, with some insight of what could be concretely put in place in the coming years. Based on the qualitative analysis performed, it can be concluded that most objectives seem globally achieved in practice in Belgium. For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that there is unfortunately not much hindsight at the submission time of this master thesis, and that a similar study should ideally verify the continuity of this positive trend in the future. However, this optimistic conclusion does not mean that no more work is required to improve audit quality, now that the European reform has been implemented in the different member States. Instead, audit quality should be considered as a perpetual quest aiming at avoiding new scandals as much as possible…