Auditors and monitoring
Auditors
The company has at least two and at most four auditors elected by the Annual General Meeting. The auditors' term of office is the company's financial year and the auditors' duties end at the conclusion of the Annual General Meeting following the meeting of their election. At least one of the auditors must be an authorized public accountant or an authorized accounting firm approved by the Central Chamber of Commerce. Finnair Plc's Annual General Meeting in 2003 elected two regular auditors, namely Authorized Accounting Firm PricewaterhouseCoopers Oy and APA Erkki Mäki-Ranta. The auditors of Finnair Group subsidiaries are mainly PricewaterhouseCoopers auditing firms or auditors employed by them.
In 2003 the Group's auditors were paid auditing fees totalling 151,800 euros. Finnair Plc also paid auditors 84,982 euros for services (taxation and IFRS consulting) unrelated to the statutory audit of the accounts.
Monitoring and reporting system
The principal task of the statutory audit is to verify that the financial statements give accurate and sufficient information about the Group's result and financial position for the financial year. The auditors report their findings to the Board of Directors once per year and submit an auditors' report to company's shareholders in connection with the annual financial statements.
The company has a risk management steering group, chaired by the President & CEO, whose task is to assess and safeguard the sufficiency, appropriateness and effectiveness of the Group's risk management, monitoring and management processes.
The Board of Directors of Finnair Plc has approved principles of internal monitoring, which are applied within the Group. Internal Auditing is responsible for fulfilling the monitoring and auditing obligation laid down in the Companies Act.
Internal auditing assists in verifying the integrity of transactions and the accuracy of information in internal and external accounting and to confirm that controls are exercised effectively, property is maintained and operations are conducted appropriately in accordance with the Group objectives. Internal auditing also participates in the auditing of Finnair Plc subsidiaries' accounts in collaboration with external auditing. The internal auditing priorities are determined in accordance with the Group's risk management strategy.
The fulfilment of financial targets is monitored by a system of Group-wide reporting. The reporting encompasses realized data and up-to-date forecasts for a rolling 12-month period. The accumulation of financial added value is monitored monthly in an internal reporting process. The Group's traffic performance is published in a monthly stock exchange bulletin.
Risks arising from operations in relating to property, interruption, accident and liability have been covered by appropriate insurances. |