This analysis was originally posted by Audit Analytics. On Tuesday, March 31, Quixant PLC – a UK-based gaming technology company – issued the following statement, claiming that KPMG LLP (UK) has decided to not sign any audit opinions or consents until April 5th: Quixant (AIM: QXT), a leading provider of innovative, highly engineered technology products principally for the global gaming and broadcast industries, today provides highlights of its unaudited financial results for the year ended 31 December 2019…

Banks and businesses have been calling for IFRS 9 Financial Instruments to be lifted. The forward-looking ‘Expected Credit Loss’ impairment model of IFRS 9 was introduced to reduce the likelihood that another financial crisis would stifle the banking system. IFRS 9 requires that financial assets such as loans are valued realistically by requiring financial institutions to make the provisions to cover loans to distressed borrowers before they start to default. Because no one can possibly tell under the current conditions whether borrowers will be able to service their loans, it is argued by some that…

Regulation, and especially a technical issue such as financial accounting, is often considered a matter for bureaucrats, not for politicians. In doing so, we tend to neglect that many accounting rules have real economic or social consequences. For example, accounting rules for stock option plans directly affect how companies compensate their management. Similarly, the accounting valuation of bank assets affects regulatory capital. Less restrictive requirements for loss recognition thus reduce the likelihood of bank bailouts.…

This analysis was originally posted by Audit Analytics.   The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is taking measures to ensure that companies take the time they need to address the challenging and complex events coronavirus (COVID-19) has caused in recent weeks when preparing their annual financial statements.  As a result, on March 21, 2020, they requested that companies delay publishing their previously scheduled preliminary results for two weeks. According to the FCA, this decision had been made in conference with both the Financial…

Dear Colleagues, As the corona crisis is sweeping the planet, it would be irresponsible to proceed with the EAA Annual Congress 2020 in Bucharest as planned. Even if the current lockdowns and travel bans were lifted by late May, academic travel will not be back to normal in time. The EAA Management Committee has therefore decided to postpone EAA 2020 in Bucharest by one year – the new dates most probably are 26-28 May 2021. This decision…

This analysis was originally posted by Audit Analytics.   The uncertainty caused by COVID-19 is causing companies in Europe to reevaluate their ability to continue as a going concern. A going concern modification is the expressed uncertainty that a company is unable to continue in the near future. Generally speaking, this uncertainty relates to whether the company will exist for another 12 months. The audit opinion of Intu Properties PLC [XLON:INTU], a UK based real estate investment…

Dear Colleagues, Many of us have faced partial or severe restrictions in the teaching process due to the coronavirus outbreak. In Slovenia, all primary and secondary scools and univeristies are shut down for at least 2 weeks. This period (mid March) for us is a month into the second semester. We faced either a suspension of the academic process with potentially unforeseen consequences (e.g. deadlines, coursework, exams, etc.) or an immediate switch to a fully…

By Jun Chen, Wang Dong, Hongling Han, and Nan Zhou As the Panel on Audit Effectiveness acknowledged that time pressures lead to substandard audits, we investigate the effect of audit partner workload compression on audit quality in China. We innovate in two areas by exploiting the unique institutional features of the Chinese capital market: the mandatory auditor signature requirement enables us to calculate workloads at the audit partner level, whereas the uniform December 31 fiscal…

This analysis was originally posted by Audit Analytics. The FTSE MIB is the benchmark stock index consisting of the 40 most traded companies on the Borsa Italiana. In this post, we’ll examine the auditor tenure and rotation for these companies.  Though Italy formally adopted the EU Audit Reform Directive 2014 policy in 2016, it was nothing new to Italy, which first introduced mandatory auditor rotation in 1975. Since 1975, Italian law has required that public companies rotate audit firms…

Baptiste Colas (PhD Student, Laval University, QC, Canada) recently visited Univesidad Carols III de Maddrid as part of the EAA ARC International PhD Visit Scheme. In this blog, he discusses how the visit went. Visiting period: 2019/09/02 to 2019/11/08 (10 weeks) Initially, my main motivation for doing a research visiting at UC3M was to extend my network in Europe and more generally learn about the European universities landscape. Since I was planning to enter the…