Law Commons^™

Why Do Auditors Fail? What Might Work? What Won't?, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Auditing failures and scandals have become commonplace. In response, reformers (including the Kingman Review in the U.K. and a recent report of the U.K.’s Competition and Market Authority) have proposed a variety of remedies, including prophylactic bans on auditors providing consulting services to their clients in the belief that this will minimize the conflicts of interest that produce auditing failures. Although useful, such reforms are already in place to a considerable degree and may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Moreover, this strategy does not address the deeper problem that clients (or their managements) may not want aggressive auditing, …