Audit

DEPENDABILITY AND RELIABILITY OF YOUR FINANCIAL INFORMATION !

Today, access to the financial statements of the businesses notably through electronic media is often the only way for all stakeholders to form an opinion on their situation. The final object of the auditor's mission is to contribute to the reliability of this financial information which is more and more heavy and complex. The audit is then an essential key to openness and safety for managers, investors and shareholders as well as for all parties in charge of evaluating the financial position of a business or company.

In matters of statutory auditing, Crowe Avvens is active throughout the French territory and in highly diversified activity sectors.

In this strongly competitive market, Crowe Avvens has implemented a service level tailored to the size and specific features of the audited business concerns. Our ambition is to provide a high level of audit throughout our mission as well as the strongest commitment from the partners and managers in terms of availability, responsiveness and attention.

Our audit process breaks down into four major phases: 

1. The understanding of your company's specific risks as well as the joint study with management of possible new issues for the year.
2. The analysis and recommendations for improving internal management audit/control.
3. The conduct of our audit process.
4. The validation of published financial information leading to our opinion.

Our audit offer also covers other legal or statutory missions such as statutory audit for shares & contributions, M&As and conversions.

Our experience and methodological tools enable us to ensure all legal missions entrusted to the auditor for shares & contributions and M&As, namely :

• Partial asset contributions
• Contributions in kind (real, movable, financial or intangible assets)
• M&As and splits
• Equity of special advantages

At the time of a contribution operation, the mission of the auditor for shares & contributions is to verify the effectiveness and value of the contributions. The auditor expresses an opinion on the non-overvaluation of the contributions. In the scope of the M&A auditing mission, the auditor is in charge of assessing the respective value of the business entities and expresses an opinion on the equitable nature of the exchange ratio. The auditor for specific advantages evaluates the lawfulness of the advantages granted to certain shareholders.

Sectors in which we have mission experience :

Aerospace – Agribusiness – Biotechnologies – Life Sciences – Mass retail – IT & Computing – Written press, etc.

Our main guidelines in the auditing process are:

• The identification of key points
• The anticipation of all issues and an open communication with the management
• A constructive spirit
• Strict compliance with required deadlines

In addition to our legal or statutory missions, the audit teams also operate in a contractual framework to conduct:

M&A AUDITS

Thanks to their corporate accounting, financial and environmental rules, our audit teams can assist the businesses for external growth, M&A, restructuring, goodwill acquisition operations.

M&A auditing involves the analysis of significant risks (accounting, financial, legal, tax, social, environmental). This analysis is useful to the buying party notably to determine the liability or profit guarantee and as required, for acquisition price readjustment (earn-out). The M&A audit also involves an assessment of the internal management audit/control and management information systems.

ORGANIZATIONAL OPERATIONAL AUDITS

Crowe Avvens also carries out operational activity or service audits for businesses in line with the objectives pursued, aiming at evaluating their organizational schemes and performance levels to finally provide improvement recommendations and guidelines (for example: audits for expediting closing processes, "rapid close").

Analysis of the internal management audit/control and risk control processes

Our teams are competence pools for risk management and internal management audit/control processes aiming at :

• implementing and optimizing risk control and management processes,
• assisting management for risk control from the risk identification to the deployment of suitable internal control measures,
• assessing the conformity of the existing processes to the regulations and internal repositories or reference systems and, as required, conducting compliance measures,
• assessing the quality and consistency of the operational and financial data and testing the reliability of the internal control processes – carrying out functional tests,
• assessing the risks, providing syntheses and recommendations – proposing improvement plans.

Internal information system control missions

• Restoring and assessing the reliability of the financial information hosted in the information system (through IS data retrieval directly from the data bases and the interface control system),
• summarizing the risks linked with control, providing recommendations and an action plan.

Business model audit missions

In case of particular difficulties or in the scope of an assessment process, miscellaneous research works for evaluation, profitability and economic efficiency can be conducted.

ASSISTANCE TO INTERNAL MANAGEMENT AUDIT

Our team also assists the internal management audit department for :

• Testing phase outsourcing missions on Sarbanes Oxley (SOX),
• Creation and development of the internal management audit function (involvement in audit plans, etc.),
• Performance review, assistance for tool selection…

Social & Human Resource Audit

• Checking compliance with the rules in effect in matters of individual/collective labor relationship and payroll management
• Audits on compliance with legal and conventional rules in matters of labor contract signature/execution, amendment and termination
• Payroll process audit
• Checking compliance with collective labor relation rules (notably working time rearrangement and reduction, employee representative bodies, profit sharing programs...)

Internal tax audits

The internal tax audit is a risk detection and risk management improvement tool, through corrective measures which we may suggest. Although it necessarily differs from a tax inspection, the interest of an internal tax audit is either a better preparation for tax inspection, or a process enabling the management to assess the risk level, either known or not.