French Auditors insist on preparing numbers...

French Auditors insist on preparing numbers...

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We have a French subsidiary and the auditors duplicate our bookeeping as well as doing the audit. Is this usual? They state that it is necessary to comply with the rules. This causes us problems because as well as the usual audit problems, we first have to reconcile the two sets of numbers, they also do not always tell us when making adjustments.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Many thanks,

Joe

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By User deleted
25th Sep 2008 13:45

they are a bureaucratic lot.....
France is very bureaucratic about these things.

I do not know how much you know but in France there is a statutory chart of accounts (well several versions actually) that must be used, and the statutory accounts must follow a very strict format - far stricter than we have in the UK.

In addition a great deal of detailed analysis is usually done for the tax report - and again the detail of the analysis is pretty rigorous.

If you want to avoid the duplication you need to ensure that your sub keeps accounting records that meet the French requirements.

You can buy a "Plan Comptable Général" from Amazon (maybe you need Amazon.fr) as a first step.

The easiest way to deal with it is to use the French chart of accounts and accounting methods for the sub and then to reorganise the figures as you need them for your UK statutory and management reporting.

We have a number of UK company clients which are subs of French companies and I recommend to them that they use the French chart of accounts (and usually the French software too) for the account sof the UK subs and then we just do a bit of rearranging for the UK stat accounts.

You will not get the French auditors to stop!

Good luck

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