Konsekvensen af en yderligere lempelse af revisionspligten i 2010

Abstrakt

At the beginning of this century EU launched a strategy for “Growth and Jobs”. The objective was to be a competitive and dynamic economy, which could generate economic growth and better jobs. The EU strategy was adopted by the national countries. Hence Denmark sat forward a growth strategy in 2002. In this strategy a promise was made that the administrative burdens for the business would be reduced by 25 % by the end of 2010. One of the administrative burdens was defined as the mandatory audit. In 2006 the first step towards audit exemption was made, as the thresholds for audit were set as the limits for small class-B companies. As the burdens have to be reduced by 25 % by the end of 2010 a bill to increase the audit thresholds further is expected in early spring 2010. It is expected that the thresholds will be equivalent to the ones of class-B companies. The experiences of this first increase in thresholds were that only 23 % of the companies have made use of the possibility not to be audited. Unfortunately most of those companies choosing not to have audit, also choose not to buy any assistance from auditor to make i.e. tax returns. The result of this is a higher percentage of errors in tax returns. When looking at EU, most countries have exemption for audit at some level. UK introduced relatively low thresholds for audit exemption in 1994. Since then they have increased in several steps so that they today are similar to the thresholds of EU. Various attempts have been made to introduce a mandatory alternative to audit, but none of these have succeeded in the long run. The Danish politicians do not all agree, as they do not all believe that it is a good idea to increase the thresholds for audit. Some politicians believe it is necessary to have a mandatory alternative to audit, something less demanding than audit. FSR are working on preparing some kind of a Danish standard that can be introduced when the thresholds of audit increases. However, this standard is only a draft and at this stage only FSR have knowledge of it. The conclusion it, that it is the smaller class-B companies that will use the possibility of not having audit. During time when the auditors have found a new product to offer the companies, that choose not to be audited, the larger class-B companies will also take advantage of not having audit. However, this requires, that a quality product is made, and that the confidence in this product is high and respected among businesses. Finally it should be noted that administrative burdens are not actually lowered by having audit exemption rules, as a rather small percentage of the companies take advantage of this possibility.