By Nicholas Hirst and Jean Comte
April 20, 2026, 07:39 GMT | Comment
A series of unannounced raids by the French competition authority on several audit firms is expected to trigger a legal battle over confidentiality in the sector, and to test the watchdog's process for conducting physical inspections.
The audit sector in France is at the center of a burgeoning controversy over the national competition regulator's power to seize documents and other sensitive information to inform its antitrust investigations. In January, the French Competition Authority raided several companies in the sector of audit and certification of financial and non-financial data (see here ). The watchdog didn't name the companies, although French media reported they included Deloitte, KPMG, EY and PwC — known as the "Big Four" — as well as the National Association of Statutory Auditors, known by the French acronym CNCC. The French competition watchdog and KPMG declined to comment. Deloitte, EY, PwC and the CNCC did not respond to requests for comment. Regardless of whether the raids lead to any further regulatory action, they have triggered a debate about confidentiality in the auditing sector and how the watchdog should carry out physical inspections. As is often the case in antitrust raids in France, the French investigators seized data and documents en masse , including the full content of the email boxes of some employees of the audit companies, MLex understands. That differs from the approach of some other European regulators, such as the European Commission, which usually runs a keyword search at companies' premises to narrow down the documents it wants to remove as part of its investigation. What makes this set of raids particularly noteworthy is that some of the inboxes belonged to regulated statutory auditors — a professional known in France as a "commissaire aux Comptes," or CAC — which provide independent auditing of companies' financial statements, MLex has learned. The laws governing these auditors include confidentiality,* meaning information they hold cannot be disclosed or shared, as they handle sensitive and market-moving company information. While French law provides some exceptions for their information to be disclosed to certain regulators, including the financial market regulator, the banking supervisor or prosecutors**, the competition authority is not among them. — Open question — There is also no general procedure for subjecting these statutory auditors to a physical inspection, as is the case with lawyers***. That means the competition authority can only rely on its general investigative powers, whose compatibility with the CAC confidentiality rules has never been legally tested. French antitrust investigators are said to have taken the position that they are not bound by the CAC confidentiality rules, as they benefit from wide-ranging inspection powers, MLex understands.In a 2021 briefing note, the CAC trade body said the auditors' professional secrecy could not be lifted in case of physical inspections by the competition authority, but also that the auditors could not refuse a request to hand over documents in an inspection visit, leaving the question open. As is usual practice, the competition authority gave the companies a few weeks to sift through the large cache of documents that were removed and to list those considered to be protected by confidentiality, so they could be returned before the search was started on the remaining materials, MLex understands. But critics have questioned whether the “smash-and-grab” approach is the right one at premises that — by their nature — contain so many confidential documents. Investigators could have tried to conduct the inspections under the criminal law, for example. The companies have challenged the antitrust raids in the Paris Court of Appeals on the basis that they infringed the auditors' confidentiality, MLex understands. That is expected to give judges the opportunity to enter the debate about where the boundary lies between physical antitrust inspections and confidentiality in the auditing industry. * Article L.821-35 of the Commercial Code
** Article L.621-22 of the Monetary and Financial Code, Article L.612-44 of the Monetary and Financial Code, Article L. 823-12 of the Commercial Code
*** Article 56-1 of the Criminal Procedure Code
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