Recent auditing trends in France

Auditors have been forced to perform remote audits due to physical distancing and telecommuting by the teams they work with. Auditing standards have not changed, but the pandemic brought new risks – significant changes to internal controls because of teleworking have made companies more vulnerable to fraud and cyberattacks.

Very quickly, companies adopted data extraction, data analysis, and AI tools to facilitate virtual audits. This automation acceleration has proved to be a good thing, as organisations have become more resilient and better positioned to respond to new business realities.

Technology will expand the audit function to derive more useful insights from the data, allowing auditors to play a more active role. For example, they can detect fraud in real time, rather than through a one-time audit based on data from years ago.

Onsite visits have resumed, but the evolution of audit processes will continue.

Audit firms struggle to retain their teams

Audit firms that are used to operating with a high turnover experienced a temporary decline in resignations at the beginning of the health crisis in 2020. However, during 2021, they witnessed a wave of resignations among their employees, who have been increasingly tempted by new horizons. Early trends in 2022 indicate that the departure wave is not completely over.

Indeed, a fundamental trend of declining attractiveness of finance and auditing has been confirmed, notably linked to increasingly strong regulatory constraints on these professions, which can feel restrictive and slow down young professionals today. In addition, constraints are accentuated by the seasonality of the profession, which has become more consistent throughout the year and no longer attracts employees accustomed to two years of teleworking.

In order to compensate for these departures, firms, whose level of audit activity has not been affected by the crisis due to the recurrence of their assignments, must recruit aggressively. With the strengthening of IT and extra- financial audits, audit firms are recruiting staff with more varied profiles than before (e.g. engineers or technical experts) to become IT auditors, data, or CSR experts.

Candidates are also more and more fond of this type of subject and wonder how audit firms can meet their expectations. In addition, enhanced IT eliminates time- consuming tasks during audits and makes the auditor’s job more interesting for young graduates.

In order to retain their auditors, firms must constantly innovate in order to offer candidates new types of assignments that could interest them and keep them longer.

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Photo: Andrey Popov - stock.adobe.com