The impact of the evidence concept in the independent audit on the auditor's opinion: A practice on BİST

Nowadays, the difficulty of accessing reliable information and making financial decisions accurately has brought independent auditing to a very important position. Providing a reasonable assurance about the accuracy and reliability of financial statements to the decision makers is only possible with an independent audit. In the audit reports, the auditor should base his opinion on the reliability and accuracy of the said statements on qualified and eligible evidence. Therefore, the audit evidence provided constitutes the core of the opinion expressed by the auditor. This study was conducted in order to identify the statements given in the independent audit reports of the companies traded in Borsa Istanbul between 2009 and 2019 and based on these reports to reveal the effect of audit evidence on these statements by examining the reports of companies that did not express their statements. In accordance with the aim of the sudy; independent audit reports of 4239 companies that are traded in BIST, obtained from the Public Disclosure Platform database and examined over the years with the content analysis method. It has been observed that, in a total of eleven-year research period, the auditors did not provide opinions on 39 independent audit reports. It was determined that the number of companies that did not express an opinion between the specified years was 13 total and the reasons based on the auditors views were discussed on the study. Since sufficient and aprropriate audit vii evidence could not be obtained by the auditors in 10 of 13 companies on a company basis and 17 of 39 reports on a report basis it was avoided. In this study, the reasons for the opinion were determined and the findings were evaluated for the companies where the auditors did not express an opinion due to insufficient evidence. Keywords: Independent Audit, Audit Evidence, Auditor's Opinion, Audit Report.