Large institutional investors from EU that manage over 1.34 trillion EUR and individual investors' representatives associations, together with PanSlovenian Shareholders` Association (VZMD), just a few days after "Ljubljana Declaration" signed the paper "Audit – a long-term investor position paper on proposed EU reforms". The signatories of this paper represent long term investors, who take their ownership responsibilities seriously, investing significant resources and time in securing, monitoring and voting their assets. Financial reports provide vital information for them to be able to monitor executives' use of their capital, and the audit of annual statements offers an essential assurance that information in company accounts is ‘true and fair'. The quality of the audit is, therefore, of utmost importance.

They believe there are five worrying features of the audit market. At a very fundamental level, they are concerned about: failure of auditors to provide adequate warnings prior to the collapse of a number of banks and insurers in the financial crisis, too few large auditors providing audit services to the largest listed companies (the average market share of the Big Four audit firms in EU member states is over 90%), high levels of non-audit work conducted by the auditor for the same company, apparently heavy dependence of the regulators and standard setters on the large audit firms for professional and financial support, lack of rotation of Audit firms – each one of them is often pointed out by the VZMD representatives at annual assemblies of companies.

This problems were already pointed out by VZMD in august this year, when EuroFinuse, the European Federation of Financial Services Users, in which VZMD collaborates as an active member and is represented in the Board of Directors by its President Mr. Kristjan Verbič, M.Sc., brought out a press release, in which they expressed their serious concern for the introduced reforms of European regulative of auditing market, that concerns European financial services users and shareholders of the European audited issuers.

EuroFinuse believes that the current economic damage, endured by shareholders of European banks, which otherwise had good audit reports, calls for more proper functioning of the audit markets in Europe. This would result in favorable impact on both, the European financial industryand auditing companies of any kind in Europe.