THE IMPORTANCE OF ACCOUNTING INFORMATION QUALITY IN THE PERFORMANCE OF STATUTORY AUDIT

In our country, internal audit is a new concept, practiced on a microeconomic level. Originally, “to audit” could have been translated as “to check the financial statements of a company”. The purpose of a statutory audit is to determine whether the organization provides a fair and specific image of its financial status, by examining information such as accounting records, bank balance, and financial operations.For a piece of accounting information to be relevant to auditors, investors, it has to support users form forecasts on the outcome of past, present and future events, be always understood or confirm and correct the trust bestowed.In the equation “accounting information – users’ decisions”, defining the concept of quality represents the main concern of the accounting normalization bodies, as referees who make the rules of the accounting “social game” between producers and users of accounting information. The literature in the field devotes to the Anglo-Saxon conceptual frameworks the primacy in defining the quality features of accounting information which it ranks depending on relevance into two groups: - one specific to the accounting information (relevance, reliability and comparability); - the other specific to the user (clearness). The quality of information is characterized by speed, frequency, accessibility, timeliness, understandability, reliability, relevance and age.Audit is not an exact science, it is based on professional reasoning to reach conclusions and decisions and making decision before uttering an opinion.