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Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley And Accounting: Rules Versus Principles Versus Rents, William W. Bratton
Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley And Accounting: Rules Versus Principles Versus Rents, William W. Bratton
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Shareholder Value And Auditor Independence, William W. Bratton
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 …