Abstract:

According to the international financial audit standards, the financial auditor’s main objective is to serve the stakeholders’ interests by expressing an independent, objective and competent opinion regarding the accuracy of financial standings. However, the manifestation of the famous cases of financial frauds on international level has also brought into discussion the auditors’ responsibility in respect of financial fraud. According to the literature, the auditors must play the role of guarantors of the reported accounting information accuracy, and not the one of accomplice, as it has been proven in some famous fraud cases. The aim is thus to test the existence of a connection between the affiliation of the customer-company to one of the big four audit companies forming Big4 and the incidence of financial frauds. The aim of this study is to substantiate a profile of the companies (defrauded and not defrauded) and a deterministic model of estimating the chances of being defrauded according to a series of factors associated to the financial auditor. The objectives of the research and the validation of the work hypotheses have been accomplished based on the study of a sample consisting of 200 defrauded and not defrauded companies, quoted on New York Stock Exchange, and the data were processed by means of SPSS 19.0 in order to get the research results.