År 1 med udvidet gennemgang

Abstract

Executive summary: Since the first of January 2013 it has been possible for companies in class B enterprises to opt for an alternative to the usual audit, a new assurance engagement standard called extended review. The extended review is still a type of audit, but it is based on a review following ISRE 2400 with four supplemental actions. The review does not have the same sort of guarantee that the annual report is correct, but the risk of a wrong conclusion from the auditor is smaller with extended review than with a review after ISRE 2400. As a means to ease their administrative burden, the Danish parliament decided to give companies the option of extended review because of its limited size and its call for less resources to handle the financial side of business. I wanted to explore how well the new extended review fills the role of alternative to audit by exploring whether the companies in class B see the opportunities in it, and the opinions of the key interested party about its utilisation. In the thesis theory section, I render a short overview of the actions behind audit, review, and extended review in order to draw on the differences between an audit and an extended review in my subsequent analysis. To analyse whether extended review is a standard that has been employed in its first year after introduction, I began by gathering statistics over how many companies have actually conducted an extended review, and what the characteristics of these companies were. The first numbers show that only 13,273 out of nearly 200,000 companies, have had an extended review done, instead of an audit. But in light of my investigation, the numbers do not seem surprising. When I contacted a bank and one of the companies that had carried out an extended review upon counsel from said bank, I found that while the bank definitely saw some opportunities in the extended review, they also held reservations toward the new standard as security is not as good as with an audit. When I was in touch with some companies who had had the opportunity of extended review, none of them knew what it was, not even the company I interviewed who had one done, because it was clear that they trusted their accountant to make the right decisions. This shows that accountants have considerable influence on whether or not extended review is going to be a success since they are the ones to advise their customers. On the other hand, the banks also seem very influential.