New ISA 600과 감사인지정제도

초록

With the full adoption of IFRS in 2011, the introduction of the NEW International Standards on Auditing (ISA) of International Federation of Accountants is under discussion in terms of auditing. According to the New ISA 600, the auditor who audits the parent company of a corporate group is responsible for the group's consolidated financial statements. In other words, the auditor is obligated to indicate in their audit report that the responsibility of the group's financial director, or the due accounting firm that is responsible for providing an audit opinion on the group, will not be lessened merely by mentioning partial auditors on the audit report. If the auditor for either the parent company or a subsidiary of a corporate group is designated, then the auditor of the parent company and the auditor of the subsidiary become artificially unidentical. This can cause a problem when expressing an audit opinion on the group's consolidated financial statements. In other words, with the introduction of the NEW ISA 600, Korea’s auditor designation system, which has been maintained over the last 20 years, has the potential to experience conflicts between the requirements of companies under the new accounting environment and the audit market's practice. In relation to the improvement measures for the designation of auditors on consolidated financial statements, this study suggests that auditor designation is confined to the company designated a mandatory auditor among the group companies. However, it is considered desirable to invest the other companies within a corporate group except to auditor designated company with the right to appoint a newly designated auditor. This is in case the controlling or subsidiary companies have shared an identical auditor before the designation of auditors at a specific rate of their total assets or above in comparison with a corporate group total assets. Such a measure can block the possibility of abusing the auditor re-designation system by allowing controlling or subsidiary companies to re-designate their auditors if they have been under the audit of an identical auditor before their auditors were designated. This is also in accordance with the intent of introducing the auditor designation system. This measure has certain additional advantages. First, the other controlling or subsidiary companies affiliated with an auditor designated company within a group company can alter their auditors at their discretion without going through a formal auditor designation procedure, thereby arranging identical auditors across the group's affiliated companies. Second, in case the auditors of the controlling or subsidiary companies have been identical prior to having their auditors designated, the group's ongoing practice can be maintained. In particular, overseas countries exhibit many occasions when the auditors of controlling and subsidiary companies are identical. This allows the re-designation of auditors considering the auditor of their overseas parent company by the contract for the induction of foreign capital and so on. In comparison, the measures suggested by this study are expected to resolve the reverse discrimination against domestic companies.

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