Business crisis and audit. The solution? The Joint Audit, as in France.

The new rules regarding the issue of corporate crisis make central the timeliness with which the crisis is recognized and with which the entrepreneur is required to notice it and intervene. Among the indicators of the crisis, the balance sheet quantities, whose correctness is guaranteed by the statutory audit, are perhaps the most noticeable.

On the January issue of the magazine Economy, Mr Rocco Abbondanza, Managing Partner of RSM Società di Revisione e Organizzazione Contabile SpA , digs into the topic of the statutory audit, which involved about 80,000 or 90,000 SMEs in Italy this past year.

In all likelihood, the statutory audit for small businesses will be carried out by audit entities of limited size, while it is important to emphasize that from 2019 onwards the statutory audit will require way more specific skills in terms of knowledge both of the operational and of the accounting typicalities.

The reliability of the statutory auditing activity on index numbers and budget figures is therefore fundamental. Yet then, how should many qualifying and critical aspects of the profession, such as the independence of the auditor, professional updating and the access to new technologies be dealt with?

Mr Rocco Abbondanza proposes to look to France and its joint audit system as a guarantee of an independent review and to share the skills of all the "actors" of the profession to make sure the regulation of the business crisis is successful.

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