131 Listed Companies Corrected Audit Reports Last Year...18% Decrease from Previous Year

The number of listed companies with amended audit reports last year decreased by more than 18% compared to the previous year.

The Financial Supervisory Service announced on the 5th that the total number of listed companies with amended audit reports, including consolidated reports, was 131 last year, accounting for about 5.1% of all listed companies. The number of listed companies with amended audit reports decreased by 18.1% from 160 companies the previous year.

Among the total 131 companies, 33 were listed on the KOSPI market, 87 on the KOSDAQ market, and 11 on the KONEX market. Additionally, the proportion of amended companies audited by the Big Four accounting firms was 16%, an increase of 0.4 percentage points compared to the previous year.

The total number of audit report amendments for listed companies last year was 379, down 7.6% from 410 the previous year. This accounted for about 27.4% of the 1,381 audit report amendments for all companies subject to external audits. The number of amendments for KOSPI-listed companies decreased to 98 from 169 the previous year, while amendments for KOSDAQ-listed companies increased to 259 from 227.

Analysis of the audit report amendments for listed companies showed that corrections to the main body of financial statements were the most frequent at 273 times, followed by notes at 80 times, and the main body of the audit report at 26 times. The proportion of corrections to the main body of financial statements was high at 72.0% for listed companies, whereas it was lower at 43.5% for unlisted companies.

Furthermore, among the amendments to individual (separate) audit reports of listed companies, changes in audit opinions totaled 23 cases, an increase from 19 cases the previous year. Most of these changes, accounting for 91.3% of all amendments, involved revisions from qualified opinions or disclaimers to unqualified opinions, while there were also 2 cases where the opinion changed from unqualified to qualified.

Regarding the amendments to audit reports of listed companies, the average elapsed time from the initial disclosure to the amendment was 23.4 months, an increase of 4.9 months compared to 18.5 months the previous year. This was longer than the overall average of 12.1 months for all companies subject to external audits.

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