Risk Assessment In Small And Medium Enterprises In The Slovak Republic

The analysis and evaluation of risks are a decisive part of risk assessment in the risk management framework. Based on the results of the analysis and risk evaluation we can classify the risks as acceptable and unacceptable ones and subsequently manage them. The small and medium enterprises pay the analysis and risk evaluation the lowest attention. In our opinion this is linked with failing to utilise exact methods which seem to be complicated for their practical utilisation. They are not used especially for analysing and evaluating the risks which have their basis in epistemic uncertainty. The professional community has been discussing epistemic uncertainty for a long time. This assumption is valid mainly in the SMEs which have no competent person on the one hand and a shortage of information concerning the area assessed on the other hand. The main goal of this article is to assess the current state of implementing the process of analysing and evaluating the risk in the SMEs and to define the main problems from a questionnaire research carried out in 2017 in which 485 SMEs working in Slovakia took part. On the base of the conducted research, we can state that in spite of the fact that only high-quality risk assessment leads the companies to take suitable measures for risk reduction, the companies pay unadequate attention to the analysis and risk evaluation.