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facts and documents whose knowledge derives from his/her appointment.
Even though duties are indeed separate, the overall control and audit should be interpreted in aunitary way: infact,both bodies act on behalf of the overall stakeholders interested in receiving input concerning the correctness of the financial statements, the adequacy of the financial and organisational systems, as well as the fairness of the activity of the governing bodies.
Given that their activities must be considered as complementary, aimed at similar goals,it should not be assumed that they can be isolated. This co-operative perspective leads to the focus on contact and communication opportunities between Statutory Auditors and the External Auditors.In their activity, any duplication should be avoided and synergies should be looked for.
The Italian Civil Code’s rules stress the need for the Statutory Committee and the External Auditors to co-operate, through a timely exchange of information during the performance of their activities, not limited to extraordinary events.
With regard to Internal Auditors, in Italy they are not regulated by the Civil
Code.The only official definition is published by the National Association ofInternal Auditors, based on that of the U.S.A.: “Internal auditing is an independent, objective assurance and consulting activity designed to add value and improve an organisation’soperations.Ithelpsanorganisationaccomplishitsobjectivesby bringing a systematic, disciplined approach to evaluate and improve the effective-ness of risk management, control and governance processes”.
Internal auditing is an independent professional service,to serve not just management but the whole organisation. In Italy the internal auditing function is still developing today.
3 .Literature review and the research questions
Company governance activity has recently been the subject of significant legislative and regulatory measures,reflected in the specialised international literature. In previous decades it was undoubtedly a central theme(Monks and Minow2001; Sheikh and Rees 1995; Power 1997); today it remains a crucial topic (Power 2004; Coffee 2006).
The Italian literature is extremely scant on this subject in terms of the number of contributions. The following represent three fundamental publications by Italian authors, at different times.
C. Masini (1959) wrote about50 years ago that an institutional reform of the most important control bodies(in particular, the Board of Statutory Auditors, a typical Italian body) should be the right starting point for achieving a more organic but gradual reform.
Airoldi et al. (1998) referred to the studies on company institutional structure, defining it as an expression of the different stakeholders who contribute to the same companies and obtain benefits from them.
More recently, G. Rossi (2006) comments on the continuous erosion of the rules, not only with regard to companies but to all aspects of life. This contributes to generating a totally uncontrolled situation.
Firstly, the authors conducted a survey regarding the most relevant contributions—focused on controls and their failure within companies—publishedby a selected number of academics and professional journals, both national and international (the authors tried to select the most important journals, according to national and international published rankings).
About 232 articles, published in 25 different journals (selected among the top accounting and auditing journals), were analysed (the period examined is from 2002 to 2004).
Appendixes 1, 2 and 3 contain three different tables. For the Italian journals the “translated titles” follow the “original titles”.2
Appendix 1 is a table containing 25 journals, and, for each journal, a summary of the main content with reference to control themes is given (letter “P” accompanying the title of some journals means that they mainly consist of professional contributions).