The auditor’s role in the context of the accounting regulations evolution

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of the auditors ‘role in validating the appropriate application of the International Financial Reporting Standards as a result of numerous changes and the complex situations from day to day, from the perspective of choosing the right method, respectively from the perspective of verifying compliance with these standards. The harmonization of the provided information facilitates the comparison in time and between companies, ensuring consistency a more granular discipline in reflecting the economic transactions. The aim is to achieve the harmonization of the accounting methods and principles by adopting the same set of Accounting Standards. Having the normalization process as a starting point, the harmonization can be achieved through a convergence process built by gathering all the useful and constructive information from the past experiences. The main objectives are to use the same language and to quantify the impact of change using the same set of tools. The distinctive element relates to the culture of each organization, but the way in which the financial statements are prepared and the way in which they are presented will remain the same if the full harmonization is achieved. Most of the time, the auditor has to assess the impact of an accounting selection at the expense of another option and to decide whether the results obtained, respectively the information provided by the entity are accurate and do not include misstatements that could significantly affect the financial statements. The selection process involves evaluating the results compared to the objectives set by the regulatory system. The role of the auditor is to assess the degree of compliance of the financial statements with an applicable financial reporting framework. The auditor's objectives are to obtain reasonable assurance that the financial statements taken as a whole are free from material misstatements which may be caused by error or fraud and to issue an audit report that includes the audit opinion. The auditor’s integrity and objectivity are directly related to the freedom from any constraint, which could affect the expression of the audit opinion. In other words, the auditor should never be affected by the influences that might compromise the professional judgment. The speed of the changes from accounting may compromise the way in which the professional judgment is applied due to the complexity of certain cases. The International Auditing Standards provide the following guideline: when the auditor is no longer in a position to evaluate a case, a specialist/ expert may be contracted. The loss of independence occurs when the auditor is influenced by the client to "overlook" certain deviations from the provisions of the International Financial Reporting Standards. The evolution of the accounting standards directly impacts the auditor's activity, as it is also shown in the study presented below. The results obtained can be extrapolated as the study focuses on a research related to the quantification of the impact of regulatory developments on the auditor's work.