The Relevance of Going Concern Disclosure: Key Matter and Audit Uncertainty

The going concern assessment is one of the most important accounting principles, and the first objective when establishing a company: to remain operational on the market and face the risks and crisis that may appear. The new audit report format includes the requirement of disclosing key audit matters (KAMs) regarding the possible risks that an entity may face, with the scope of enhancing the communicative value of the auditor’s report. The objective of the paper is to analyze the evolution of including going concern as a key audit matter and as an uncertainty paragraph, as well as the factors for which this information may appear in the audit report. Based on the data extracted from the Audit Analytics database, the sample was of 1645 companies and 3729 going concern KAM observations. Most of the audited companies were in the field of Finance, insurance and real estate (21.99%), and in the field of Mining, construction (19.71%). The results are pointing out that going concern KAMs should be treated related to many characteristics, as the type of the auditor, the influence factors, the industry, and so on. Also, during the data analysis, it was observed that the going concern uncertainty persisted during several years among companies, which means that even if a company is registering a going concern uncertainty, it can still be operational, but not at its best and not for a long-term period. Moreover, the crisis generated by Covid-19 pandemic was a significant influence factor in issuing going concern uncertainties or KAMs. Reporting on going concern assessment issues is of essential importance because its increasing investor’s confidence and the transparency of the financial statements is improved.