JOIRIS, ROUSSEAUX ET Co, REVISEURS D'ENTREPRISES ASSOCIES

Joiris, Rousseaux & Co is a firm of registered statutory auditors set up as a private limited company in 1999. It is listed in the public register of the Belgian Institute of Registered Auditors under number B00194. Its head office is on rue de la Biche in Mons, and the firm works from three locations, Mons, La Louvière and Charleroi, to stay close to its clients in Hainaut. It states from the outset that it offers no accounting or tax services: its business is audit and certification, which sets it apart from the accounting firms listed in this directory.

The team has sixteen members: five signing audit partners, three trainee auditors, five audit staff and three executive assistants. The partners named are Pierre-Olivier Elsen, Sébastien Gonet, Alexis Pruneau, Cendrine Quiroga and Bernard Rousseaux. The firm describes itself as a mid-sized practice that ensures client engagements are carried out directly by experienced audit partners, supported by their staff. Frequent contact with SMEs and the public sector has given it, in its own words, speed, flexibility and versatility.

The recurring statutory assignments under the Belgian Companies and Associations Code are the core of the business: certification of annual accounts, certification of consolidated accounts and the assignment with the works council. The firm currently holds statutory auditor mandates in around two hundred entities. On top of these come occasional legal assignments: contributions in kind and quasi-contributions, mergers and demergers, capital increases, the net asset test and liquidity test in private limited and cooperative companies, interim dividends, dissolution and liquidation, change of legal form and the informed consent assignments.

The firm also carries out contractual engagements compatible with its status: reasonable assurance and limited review engagements on historical financial information, engagements under ISAE 3402, 3420 and 3000, the last for sustainability information, agreed-upon procedures and compilation under ISRS standards, and reviews of prospective information. It lists court-appointed expert work, voluntary consolidation, reporting packages, valuation of companies and notarial practices, acquisition audits, inspection of notarial practices and pharmacy transfers, football club licensing and grant certification.

The public and semi-public sector plays a major role. The firm was approved under the Plan Tonus for municipalities and has examined the accounts of several towns and municipalities. As a member of the Urbis economic interest grouping, it took part from 1993 in the work of the unit in charge of the New Municipal Accounting system and trained staff from the sixty-nine municipalities of the province of Hainaut under the Proagec project. It has been statutory auditor of more than twenty of the sixty-four Walloon public housing companies and of some fifteen inter-municipal companies, and it certifies accounts of public social welfare centres, autonomous municipal agencies and public interest bodies.

On the private and non-profit side, the list of sectors covered is long: car dealerships, construction in the broad sense, building materials trading, architecture practices, nursing and care homes, engineering, fuel retail, breweries and distilleries, electricity generation, pharmacies, bakeries, property management and food retail. Among non-profits, the firm works for sports federations, football clubs, care facilities for people with disabilities, museums and business centres. It takes on trainee auditors and welcomes unsolicited applications.