WHO IS WHO ON THE AUDIT SERVICES MARKET IN THE REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA - BIG FOUR VERSUS NON-BIG FOUR

Abstract

In the light of aligning the revised Eight Company Law Directive to the amendments of the Audit Law from September 2005, amongst the other, was introduced the obligation of the audit firms to present transparency reports. Defining the minimum segments and their order, the transparency reports were supposed to disclose the information related to the functioning of the audit firms which were considered as business secret. The first transparency reports were presented in 2007. Trying to give an overview of the states of affairs in the audit services market in the Republic of Macedonia, in this paper we will focus our attention to the three key segments of the transparency reports related to the: number of auditees, revenues realised from performed audit and nonaudit services and the statements about the method of determining the engagement partner’s fee. The paper is consisted of three segments. In the first one, is given an overview of the states of affairs in the audit profession before introducing the obligation for presentation of transparency reports. In the second one, we will analyse in more details the transparency reports presented on the period 2007-2014 especially regarding the allocation of the auditees to the audit firms and revenues realised and the influence of the Big 4 and non-Big 4 over the audit services market. At the end, in the third part, we will move our focus of attention to the benefits the information presented in the transparency reports offer to potential beneficiaries. We hope that with these three segments of the paper we will come to an answer to the question initiated in the title, more precisely we will identify who is who in the audit services market in the Republic of Macedonia.