The auditors who sign off on corporate accounts are a group who generally remain in the background of public debates over failures, and those who have handled banks’ book during the recent global financial crisis are no exception, but a 12 March report on Lehmann looks set to change this. Anton Valukas was appointed by a US court to provide a report after Lehmann’s 2008 bankruptcy, the largest in US corporate history. Among Valukas’s findings, detailed in the 2,200-page report: Ernst & Young, one of the Big Four accounting firms, did not live up to professional standards. The Financial Times argues that ‘the claims against E&Y, although exceptional, give grist to a growing lobby questioning the purpose of auditors in providing investors with a true picture of the financial health of a company.”
The scrutiny by world media of Ernst & Young following Friday’s report was followed Monday 15 March by the news that Saudi Arabia has pulled the auditing company’s securities license, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Links to other sites: Ernst & Young, Financial Times, Guardian/Observer, JDSUpra legal blog, New York Times, UK Reuters UK/Yahoo
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 15 March 2010.
Filed under: World news
Tags: Anton Valukas, bankruptcy, banks, Ernst & Young, global finan, global financial crisis, Lehmann, New York
March 15th, 2010 at 3:40 pm
I have first hand experience with the likes of Ernst & Young. They are no better then the worst of the “bad guys” in these financial schemes. In the end, padding their pockets and protecting the financial interests of their general partners seems to be the goal without any consideration for ethics or the consequences of their actions.
Perhaps they are “too big to prosecute”……