Abstract

The H3C was created by the LSF Act of 2003 (LSF) to regulate the auditing profession in France. It is considered as an external control authority. The auditor independence is considered as the first preoccupation of this new authority. This paper focuses on the impact of the H3C on auditor independence in France context from 2002 to 2007. The first hypothesis is related to the establishment of the H3C and auditor independence and the second deals with the relation between the start of the inspection program and the auditor independence. Our data was obtained from Thomson Financial Data for 140 enterprises. The empirical results show that the auditor independence increases only after the creation of the H3C. Contrary to this result, the auditors' independence did not increase significantly after the announcement of the inspection process because the inspection process started in 2007. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.