Should Creditors Believe in Auditors’ Opinions? Auditors’ Independence, Going-Concern Warnings and Credit Risk Assessment

Credit risk assessment is an inherent component of banking activity and it is crucial to analyse time aspect of credit risk. During that assessment banks ought to use only reliable documents to achieve reasonable results. Financial statements should not be the one and only data source support loan decision but they are indispensable. This study is a part of research trend assessing auditors’ independence. The purpose of it was twofold. Firstly, to determine if there exists significant dependence between business continuity evidenced by bankruptcies and going-concern warnings paragraphs (GCW) in auditors’ opinion. Secondly, to examine possible interrelation of existence GCW in auditors’ opinion and non-audit fees earned by these auditors. The research question for this paper is whether banks and other creditors may still base on financial statements and auditor’s opinions. To the limitation that the aim of this paper was not to give clear answer which measure of going-concern risk is most appropriate, it presents outcomes of an investigation of a sample of companies quoted on Warsaw Stock Exchange (Poland) main market, that submitted request for bankruptcy to the court register between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2013.