Audit in Small Municipalities
Evidence from the Slovak Republic
Copyright (c) 2026 Lenka Hudáková Stašová, Radoslav Tušan
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
All municipalities in the Slovak Republic are legally required to audit their financial statements. This study examines the auditing of financial statements in small municipalities over a five-year period, between 2020 and 2024. We inquired whether there are municipalities that fail to fulfil their statutory audit obligation and whether municipalities publish annual reports and auditors’ reports. Furthermore, we examined whether the municipalities’ financial statements provide a true and fair view, whether there are any gender-based differences in attitudes towards audited financial statements, and the varying approaches of individual auditors and auditing firms in the opinion sections of audit reports. The analysis utilises audit report data from small municipalities in all eight self-governing regions of the Slovak Republic, based on a statistically significant sample, and the hypotheses were tested through Pearson’s chi-square test of independence. The overall rating of municipalities regarding compliance with their obligations was conducted using Min-Max normalisation, and we found that there are statistically significant differences between regions in all the areas examined.
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References
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This study was supported by grant No. 1/0366/23 “Value for money in public procurement” of the “VEGA”.