A (Cooling-off period for the engagement of former auditors by the audited company - Opinion)

(Request for a preliminary ruling from the Helsingin hallinto-oikeus (Administrative Court, Helsinki, Finland))

(Reference for a preliminary ruling – Auditors – Directive 2006/43/EC – Article 22a – Cooling-off period for the engagement of former auditors by the audited company – Infringement of the prohibition on taking up a key management position in the audited entity – Independence of auditors)

Directive 2006/43/EC ( 2 ) provides that auditors must be independent of the audited entity and must not be involved in the decision-taking of that entity.

One of the statutory requirements laid down in order to ensure such independence was adopted in 2014, in Directive 2014/56/EU, ( 3 ) which incorporated into Directive 2006/43 a new provision, Article 22a, under which persons having the status of ‘key audit partner’ ( 4 ) are not allowed to take up a key management position in the audited entity for a given period. ( 5 )

Since 2014, that prohibition, which had previously applied, as one would expect, to the period of the key audit partner’s role as the person primarily responsible for the statutory audit of the audited undertaking’s accounts, has also applied to the period (of one or two years, depending on whether or not the undertaking in question is a public-interest entity) ( 6 ) subsequent to that person’s departure from the role of key audit partner.