Il giudizio sulla coerenza tra bilancio e relazione sulla gestione. Opportunità, limiti e prime evidenze empiriche

By the introduction of the Legislative Decree no. 32/2007, auditors are explicitly required to release a consistency opinion between the Financial Statement and the Management Report (MR). This is not a really new task for auditors operating in Italy, although it seems to be originalits distinctive location at the end of the Audit Report and its autonomy from the traditional auditor’s opinion. So, this work deals with the new consistency opinion, firstly, by examining the different content and form of the MR and the Audit Report, and by offering a synthesis of thenotions of consistency provided by the main standard setters, in particular focusing on the prudential notion of (in-)consistency recommended by the CNDCEC (2009b). Secondly, an exploration of the meaning of the term « consistency » from a semantic, financial and auditing point ofview is also reported. Thirdly, the paper stresses the opportunity to adopt an extensive conception of consistency in order to enhance the auditing function, although emphasizing also the difficultiesand risks — e.g. in term of a new « expectations gap » — that such an idea of auditing,similar to the operational auditing, can include.In order to verify how the CNDCEC’s notion of consistency was implemented, an empirical survey has been also conducted. In particular, a sample of 321 Audit Reports of listed companies on the Italian Stock Exchange has been observed as to the traditional opinion and the new consistency opinion, with the aim to examine the relationship they present. Results, not only provide an updating of previous researches (e.g. Di Pietra 2005) of the auditor’s opinion on Financial Statement but, as this work represents a first survey on the new consistency opinion, they also allow to discover how auditors have judged the Financial Statement compared with the MR. In particular, findings show a sort of « consequentiality » between the two opinions, due to a really prudential behavior of the auditors who implicitly refuse the opportunity both to express a more flexible consistency opinion and to enlarge the extent of the external auditing function.