Board Member Independence as a Legal Requirement in Statutory Audits

Abstract

Employing an appropriate method of choosing an auditor together with his competence (both knowledge and ethical conduct) constitute conditio sine qua non of the efficient performance of financial audits. It should be noted that an auditor’s performance can be optimised only if he finds appropriate counterparts at the entity he is to audit. Apart from management board members, particular attention should be paid to the supervisory board members. Strengthening the position of the supervisory bodies in financial reporting and audit-related issues is becoming a more and more visible trend in current legislation (e.g. article 4a of the law on accountancy). The first purpose of this paper is to find a substantive criterion by which to determine whether an auditor has an appropriate counterpart within the entity he is auditing (this is the independence of the supervisory board members). The second purpose is to check how common it is for supervisory board members to actually be independent (examples of two groups of companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange are analysed).