Un mauvais auditeur : manque d'indépendance et/ou de compétence ? Étude exploratoire des motifs de condamnation des commissaires aux comptes sur le marché de l'audit en France

The auditor?s role (in France, the « Commissaire aux comptes ») is to issue an opinion on the audited company?s financial statements. The quality of the auditor?s task depends of his/ her competence and independence (De Angelo, 1981). However, most of the studies as well as regulations about audit quality, deal with independence. Moreover post Enron regulations have mainly been focused on independence. Is this lower interest on competence justified? Is competence so high that poor auditors are only non independent auditors? We have studied the decisions issued against French auditors from 1989 until 2005. We have found that, if incompetence is less frequent than non independence, the frequency ratio is only 1 to 2. We explain this result by the audit market characteristics: disciplinary sanctions in France should be assimilated to the market role in the US by eliminating the non competent auditors. Original additional results are also discussed.