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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jurgis Bekepuris who wrote (41825)	3/17/2011 4:24:07 PM
From: ValueGuy	Respond to of 78525

You'd be surprised at how lax the review process is at some of the Big Four firms, especially if the fees are small and the company is 'not worth' the partner's time. I agree that they may not be party to fraud like AA was, but errors do occur quite frequently. Besides, since the demise of AA, IMO there has been a lot of leeway given to the Big Four as regulators don't want another big audit firm to fail, thus concentrating audits into fewer firms and exacerbating the monopoly of audits the Big Four currently enjoy. So regulators like the SEC like to go down the road of settlements rather than bringing a civil/criminal case against the firm. Some links to selected cases below. Again, none of them IMO are as strong as the case made against AA, but it is quite eye opening. business.timesonline.co.uk retheauditors.com crocodyl.org ft.com giftsanddec.com That is not to say that big four auditors are totally unreliable. Of course they're not. Their audit process is robust most of the time. But as mentioned above, errors do occur. Apologies for the lengthy off topic post.