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University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Series

Securities Law

Accounting Law

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Law

Heedless Globalism: The Sec's Roadmap To Accounting Convergence, William W. Bratton Jan 2010

Heedless Globalism: The Sec's Roadmap To Accounting Convergence, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) has introduced a "Roadmap" that describes a process leading to mandatory use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) by domestic issuers by 2014. The SEC justifies this initiative on the grounds that global standardization yields cost savings and an ultimate gain in comparability, facilitating the search for global opportunities by u.s. investors and making u.s. capital markets more attractive to foreign issuers. This Article shows that the offered justification is inadequate. The SEC frames the matter as a choice between two institutional frameworks for standard setting, holding out high quality sets of standards, asking which …


Treatment Differences And Political Realities In The Gaap-Ifrs Debate, William W. Bratton, Lawrence A. Cunningham Jan 2009

Treatment Differences And Political Realities In The Gaap-Ifrs Debate, William W. Bratton, Lawrence A. Cunningham

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Shareholder Value And Auditor Independence, William W. Bratton Jan 2003

Shareholder Value And Auditor Independence, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article questions the practice of framing problems concerning auditors’ professional responsibility inside a principal-agent paradigm. If professional independence is to be achieved, auditors cannot be enmeshed in agency relationships with the shareholders of their audit clients. As agents, the auditors by definition become subject to the principal’s control and cannot act independently. For the same reason, auditors’ duties should be neither articulated in the framework of corporate law fiduciary duty, nor conceived relationally at all. These assertions follow from an inquiry into the operative notion of the shareholder-beneficiary. The Article unpacks the notion of the shareholder and tells a …


Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley And Accounting: Rules Versus Principles Versus Rents, William W. Bratton Jan 2003

Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley And Accounting: Rules Versus Principles Versus Rents, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.