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Full-Text Articles in Business
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 …
Was Arthur Andersen Different?: An Empirical Examination Of Major Accounting Firms' Audits Of Large Clients, Theodore Eisenberg, Jonathan R. Macey
Was Arthur Andersen Different?: An Empirical Examination Of Major Accounting Firms' Audits Of Large Clients, Theodore Eisenberg, Jonathan R. Macey
Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers
Enron and other corporate financial scandals focused attention on the accounting industry in general and on Arthur Andersen in particular. Part of the policy response to Enron, the criminal prosecution of Andersen, eliminated one of the few major audit firms capable of auditing many large, public corporations. This article explores whether Andersen’s performance, as measured by frequency of financial restatements, measurably differed from that of other large auditors. Financial restatements trigger significant negative market reactions and their frequency can be viewed as a measure of accounting performance. We analyze the financial restatement activity of approximately 1,000 large, public firms from …