Abstract

In an audit of a firm’s financial statements, the auditor assesses whether there is material uncertainty about the firm’s ability to continue as a going concern. If the existence of material uncertainty is confirmed, the auditor considers the adequacy of the firm’s disclosures regarding its going concern in the firm’s annual report. Most commonly, if the firm’s disclosures are adequate, the auditor issues a going-concern opinion in the auditor’s report. The auditor modifies his opinion on firm’s financial statements because of auditor’s going-concern doubt on the firm’s ability to continue as a going-concern rarely in specific circumstances. In the present paper we provide an auditor’s going-concern prediction model using various combinations of a firm’s economic predictors. A sample data of 14,761 firm-year observations from Slovenia during the period 2005–2013 has been used for the model. The results reveal that firms with a going-concern qualification have a worse financial structure (i.e., lower equity financing rates), worse liquidity, worse efficiency, and worse profitability in comparison to firms without this qualification. Using a logistic regression prediction model for a going concern qualification in auditor’s report, qualification can be predicted with sufficient accuracy on a sample data of Slovenian firms.

摘要

在对公司财务报表进行审计时，审计师评估公司持续经营的能力是否存在重大不确定性。如果确认存在重大不确定性，审计师会考虑公司在年度报告中对持续经营的披露是否充分。最常见的是，如果公司的披露充分，审计师会在审计报告中发表持续经营意见。由于审计师对公司在特定情况下的持续经营能力的持续经营怀疑，审计师很少修改其对公司财务报表的意见。在本文中，我们提供了一个审计师的持续经营预测模型，该模型使用公司经济预测变量的各种组合。14个样本数据，该模型使用了 2005-2013 年期间斯洛文尼亚的 761 个公司年观测值。结果表明，与没有持续经营资格的公司相比，具有持续经营资格的公司财务结构更差（即股权融资率更低）、流动性更差、效率更低、盈利能力更差。使用逻辑回归预测模型对审计报告中的持续经营资格进行预测，可以在斯洛文尼亚公司的样本数据上以足够准确的方式预测资格。