Voluntary External Audit and Internal Control in Romanian Agricultural Entities: Survey Evidence
Voluntary External Audit and Internal Control in Romanian Agricultural Entities: Survey Evidence

Summary/Abstract: Most Romanian agricultural entities fall below the size criteria that trigger a statutory audit, so any audit they engage is one they chose to engage. This paper asks which entities make that choice and tests two explanations, one based on the monitoring needs of external financiers and one based on the entity's own governance apparatus. The evidence comes from a questionnaire administered between 4 May and 26 June 2026, screened so that every entity retained is below the statutory audit obligation; 146 valid responses from 35 counties were obtained. Among them, 18.5 per cent report an external audit performed by an authorised firm and 15.8 per cent report a formal internal control structure. Voluntary audit is strongly associated with size, legal form, a formal internal control function and sustainability reporting, and not at all with having accessed public funds or bank credit. A logistic regression confirms the pattern: having ten or more employees multiplies the odds of audit by 7.36, a formal internal control function by 5.30 and sustainability reporting by 3.71, while access to external finance carries no significant coefficient. Legal form is examined bivariately only, because audited individual undertakings are too rare for a multivariate estimate. The findings suggest that voluntary audit in this sector is bought as part of an internal governance package rather than to satisfy an outside financier, with consequences for how the profession markets assurance to farms and how regulators might raise assurance quality without extending audit obligations.

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