Les responsabilités du réviseur d'entreprises dans le cadre de la fraude ; impact des normes ISA

Abstract

In our days, to be a Réviseur d’Entreprises is not as easy as people could think. This profession is framed by many laws, standards and ethical rules. These regulations confer many responsibilities to the auditor as civil, criminal and disciplinary liability. In a world where fraud is on the rise, people give a lot of importance to external auditor. Although fraud detection is not his duty, people tend to think that the external auditor has to search and find the fraud in their company. Therefore, the role of the external auditor in fraud prevention and detection is often challenged when fraud scandals occur. Thankfully, the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board wrote ISA standards in the 2000s. The aim of these standards is to help the external auditor in his mission of financial statements controls. In a fraud context, the ISA 240 concerning “The auditor’s responsibilities relating to fraud in an audit of financial statements” is essential as they specify the external auditor’s role, responsibilities, objectives, obligations and diligence when he faced fraud. Therefore, the aim of this write is to understand the external auditor’s responsibilities in a context of fraud. We will try to see the impact of the International Standard of Auditing. Does the ISA standard (especially ISA 240) really help the external auditor to prevent and detect fraud? We also intend to provide some answers to the final question: In the actual context, could fraud scandals as Madoff or Enron happen again? To that end, we executed a qualitative research based on two ways of gathering evidence. Our research is firstly based on a literature and laws review. Then, we performed six interviews of external auditors. The result of our research is quite qualified and depends of the size of the audit cabinet. Big firms as the Big Four have not noticed any significant change since they use the ISA standards. However, it seems that it has been the chaos for the small cabinet. About the last questions, we can conclude that scandals could still happen today despite the new regulations. However, it will be probably more difficult than before.