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Who Pays The Auditor Calls The Tune?: Auditing Regulations And Clients' Incentives, Amy Shapiro
Who Pays The Auditor Calls The Tune?: Auditing Regulations And Clients' Incentives, Amy Shapiro
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
As we move on from the financial scandals of the early 2000s, the question of how to prevent the next Enron continues to be a pressing one. This Article focuses on the law’s deeply conflicted treatment of auditors of public corporations. Though the audit firm is charged with serving as the public’s watchdog in insuring good financial disclosure, the auditor’s actual client is the audited corporation itself, whose interests concerning disclosure are not necessarily aligned with those of investors. Because the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 left this structure in place, further reform is needed. One promising suggestion is to give …
Playing Peekaboo With Constitutional Law: The Pcaob And Its Public/Private Status, Donna M. Nagy
Playing Peekaboo With Constitutional Law: The Pcaob And Its Public/Private Status, Donna M. Nagy
Articles by Maurer Faculty
This Article is the first to consider the constitutional status of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB - pronounced by some as peekaboo). Congress created the PCAOB in 2002 to regulate the accounting profession in response to scandals at Enron, WorldCom, and other public companies. The Article argues that notwithstanding the PCAOB's congressional designation as a nonprofit corporation in the private sector, its governmental creation, governmental objectives, governmental powers, and governmentally appointed board members render it a public (or state) actor for purposes of constitutional law. The Article also analyzes the PCAOB from a policy perspective, and argues that …