CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING THE FINANCIAL AUDIT OF EU-FUNDED PROJECTS

Abstract

Financial auditors, members of the Romanian Chamber of Financial Auditors, are involved in the activity of verifying that the implementation of EU-funded projects is compliant with the relevant national and European legislation. They conclude audit contracts with the beneficiaries of European funds, perform external financial audit services upon the projects’ implementation activities and provide audit reports which are presented by beneficiaries to the management authorities in order to certify the eligibility of projects’ expenses for reimbursement. In this paper, our aim is to perform a study upon this specific segment of the financial audit services market in Romania, by collecting and analysing data related to the financial audit contracts which have been awarded through the national public procurement electronic system in the time period 2013-2021. Our research results will respond to some specific objectives. Firstly, this study establishes how the number of audit contracts is spread over the main operational programs implemented in Romania and through which the audited projects have been financed. Further, we aim to discover if the market concentration to a small number of local audit firms involved in this field, which has been proved in a previous study covering the period 2011-2012, maintained or not from year 2013 to date. Finally, we will obtain an overview of the main audit firms acting in this market segment, based on researching which firms gained the biggest number of audit contracts and performed most of the required audit engagements in the analysed period.

Keywords

• eu-funded projects
• financial audit
• audit firms
• audit contracts