AUDITOR'S ASSESSMENT OF GOING CONCERN ASSUMPTION THROUGH BANKRUPTCY PREDICTION MODELS

One of the most relevant judgments the auditors express when auditing a company is whether this company can be considered as going concern. International auditing standards do not explicitly prescribe which analytical procedures should be used for that purpose but bankruptcy prediction models have proven useful according to relevant international literature. In this paper we investigate the auditor's assessment of going concern in order to assess the efficacy of Altman's and Zmijewski 's prognostic models for predicting the going concern basis. The research is based on a sample of financially unstable companies in the Republic of Croatia that operated at loss in the observed period. The research sample was stratified into two groups, the first which consists of unstable companies assessed as going concern by the auditor (GC companies), whereas the other group is formed of unstable companies that the auditor assessed as those that would not operate as going concern (GCU companies). Using a one-way Mann - Whitney - Wilcoxon test, it was determined that Altman's and Zmijewski's score have statistically significantly higher (more favourable) value for the unstable companies which auditor assessed as going concern than for unstable companies which the auditor assessed as not being able to continue as going concern. We can conclude that statistical analysis performed on our sample of Croatian companies is in favour of the commonly accepted fact that bankruptcy models are appropriate classifiers of companies and can be used to assess going concern for financially unstable companies.