Audited for years by the NAO, but why was Telekom left to a private auditor in 2025?

Telekomi i Kosovës, whose 2024 financial statements were audited by the National Audit Office (NAO) and received an unmodified opinion, a year later was not subjected to audit by the country’s supreme audit institution, as Klan Kosova writes, based on the investigation of the KIKS Kosova programme.

The 2025 financial statements were audited by the private company “Nexia Kosovo”, while the reason why the NAO did not audit Telekom remains officially unexplained. KIKS Kosova asked the National Audit Office for clarification as to why the public enterprise was not audited by it for 2025, but received no answer. Unofficially, the programme learned that the reason was the fact that for 2024 the NAO had given an unmodified opinion.

The change of auditor also brought a different result: whereas for 2024 the NAO had given an unmodified opinion, for 2025 Nexia gave a qualified opinion, and the private auditor’s reservation relates to one of the main elements of the financial statements — revenues. In its audit report, Nexia finds that the company did not have a sufficiently and appropriately documented model, process, policies and methodology for applying the requirements of IFRS 15 to the main revenue categories.

According to the auditor, what was missing was a full, documented analysis of customer contracts, performance obligations, the way the price is allocated and the moment when revenue is recorded — a particularly important problem for long-term contracts and packages containing several services. Because of this, Nexia says it could not determine whether revenues, trade receivables and deferred revenues are fairly presented under IFRS 15.

Telekom takes a different position. In its reply to KIKS Kosova, the enterprise says it has analysed the auditor’s opinion but has not assessed that it needs to make corrections: according to Telekom, the audit report neither requested nor recommended any correction to the statements, and the opinion does not find that the reported revenues are not in compliance with IFRS — but that, in the absence of a written methodology, it cannot determine the effect that the existence of such a methodology would have.