Relazione sulla gestione: il controllo legale

The aim of this paper is a critical analysis of the existing controls and auditing procedures over the “Operating and Financial review” (from now on “Review”) drafted in Italian firms by the Board of Directors. Recently, CNDCEC issued an auditing statement (n. 001) dealing with the compliance judgement over the Review relating to the primary data of the Annual Report. In our view, in fact, this very important source of information has to be controlled (not really audited) by another oversight board, i.e. the Collegio Sindacale and this due to many reasons involving the particular characteristics of the information that the Board of Directors intends to communicate through the issuance of its Review. That is a descriptive paper providing mainly non quantitative information and – among the quantitative ones – non financial data, including expectations about the internal and external (environmental, social, economic) situation of the firm. The ordinary way of working audit firms follow, pursues the objective of controlling the Review only for the few parts of it referring to financial data derived from accounting systems: for all other information, they probably cannot provide a professional view to satisfy the informative needs of the users of the annual financial report. For these arguments, we believe that many parts of the content of the Review has to be supervised – and formally noted in its annual report – by the board of statutory auditors of the firm, the “Collegio Sindacale”.