Les Dimensions De La Performance Des Cabinets D'Audit Legal - The Performance Dimensions Of Legal Audit Firms

The quality of accounts certification rendered by the legal audit firms is an important element in the transparency of economic activities. Many actors contribute to the quality: auditors, audit firms and professional organizations. The audit firms must reconcile their lucrative aim and the demands of different stakeholders. The firms must therefore be performing at several levels. This research studies the performance indicators of audit firms in their legal mission in France. The proposed tool to measure performance is in the form of a strategic scorecard, which is a combination of the Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan and Norton, 1992, 1998, 2000), the Skandia's Navigator (Edvinsson and Malone, 1997), as well as of the approach by intellectual capital (Roos et al., 1997, Johnson, 1999). To construct a measure of performance dimensions, we adopted the Churchill's approach (1979). Based on the data collected from qualitative and quantitative surveys, the principal component analysis (PCA) on each of the performance dimensions emerges axes among the performance items revealed by French auditors. After that, a confirmatory analysis (CFA) must help us to validate the proposed model. It is interesting to find that the dimension "Finance" is not validated in our model. A typology analysis will be realized in order to classify the firms into four groups following their performance dimensions: the reputed, the normative, the adaptive and the passive.