비교법적 고찰을 통한 우리나라 감사제도의 실태와 개선방안

This paper presents a comparative study on auditing systems in foreign advanced countries and proposes policies for improving the auditing system in Korea. In order to propose an auditing system that complies with desired objectives, the current problems in systems for the auditing duties should be first reviewed. Next, legal policies for an effective auditing system should be developed. In particular, the relationship between the statutory auditing agency, the audit committee and a corporation’s internal supervising mechanism (board of directors) should be defined. And the duties of the statutory audit committee should be independent from those of the corporation’s internal control mechanism. To accomplish this goal, this paper reviews whether the current Commercial Law aptly encourages all corporations to adopt an auditing system and an audit committee, or whether the commercial law mandates large corporations to introduce the audit committee. This paper postulates that, as the current Commercial Law lacks measures ensuring independence of the auditing agency and the audit committee, the law should mandate all listed enterprises to adopt a standard auditing system. In addition, the concepts of external audit, internal audit, and a corporation’s internal control mechanism should be further defined to avoid ambiguity. Among other policies, this paper suggests that the law mandates corporations to adopt a subsidiary auditing mechanism, depending on the size of the corporation. Finally, this paper argues that by constructing a boundary and a check and balances system between corporation’s internal executive directors and a statutory auditing agency, Korea will garner an advanced auditing system.