Auditing in agricultural sales cooperatives and unions

Organized agriculture is an important necessity in order to increase production in agriculture, to produce quality, efficient production, and to increase the welfare of those dealing with agriculture. Agricultural sales cooperatives and unions are the best options for organized agriculture. The number of the agricultural sales cooperatives is 399, and the number of the members of these cooperatives is 533 456 in Turkey in March 2018. Although cooperative enterprises are considered as a commercial enterprise, they differ from other commercial enterprises with various features. Especially, they are not profit-making and they operate according to some principles and values, and they work on the basis of volunteerism and solidarity. Co-operative enterprises, however, are open to various frauds in terms of their structure thus good controlling and auditing are necessary to be successful. In Turkey, the lack of effective guiding of the internal and external auditing mechanisms relating to cooperatives and experienced negativity because of the gradual increase in the trust and image problems in the cooperatives in some cooperative types have increasingly needed an effective external audit mechanism. In this context, new regulations were made in 2013 on the subject of independent auditing of agricultural sales cooperatives and unions and the cooperatives carrying certain conditions were subject to this regulation. In this study, the independent audit principles have been examined in order to solve the controlling problems of agricultural sales cooperatives in Turkey.