PCAOB Staff Audit Practice Alert Essay

PAGES
2
WORDS
544
Cite

Once this has happened, the auditor is in a position to assess the risk of material misstatement in the financial statements. The auditor should consider, for example, management's selection and application of accounting principles in assessing the risk of fraud. Some red flags identified in the alert are when the transaction is overly complex; whether or not management has discussed the accounting of such transactions; if management is placing undue emphasis on accounting treatment of a transaction; if transactions involve third parties, including special purpose entities; and if the transactions do not have sufficient substance. The alert prescribes a course of action for situations when an auditor believes that there is a significant risk of material misstatement. The auditor must identify his or her findings in an engagement...

...

Yet the auditors at Ernst & Young signed off on the statements. This PCOAB alert highlights the course of action that the auditors should have undertaken. They should have questioned management about the transactions and could have withheld signature on the financial statements until the nature of the Repo 105 transactions was disclosed. This would have allowed investors to understand the true financial health (or lack thereof) at Lehman Brothers in advance of the company's collapse.

Cite this Document:

"PCAOB Staff Audit Practice Alert" (2010, May 10) Retrieved April 19, 2024, from
https://www.paperdue.com/essay/pcaob-staff-audit-practice-alert-2927

"PCAOB Staff Audit Practice Alert" 10 May 2010. Web.19 April. 2024. <
https://www.paperdue.com/essay/pcaob-staff-audit-practice-alert-2927>

"PCAOB Staff Audit Practice Alert", 10 May 2010, Accessed.19 April. 2024,
https://www.paperdue.com/essay/pcaob-staff-audit-practice-alert-2927

Related Documents

Lehman Brothers and Risk Management This report examines the Lehman Brothers collapse and discusses issues of investment bank risk management. The report considers factors which contributed to Lehman's failure, from financial engineering as practiced by CEO Richard Fuld and other executives to lax auditing by Ernst & Young to the influence of an industry characterized by excessive risk-taking. In particular, the report focuses on the presence of inherent conflicts of interest,

Lehman Brothers Case Study The author of this report is asked to answer to several case study questions related to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and what led up to it. The first question asks about Lehman Brothers' Repo 105 policy and what, if any, policy Ernst and Young (its auditor) had at that point to develop the accounting policy and process as well as monitor Lehman's usage and compliance of

Lehman Brothers Failure On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest U.S. investment bank at the time, filed for bankruptcy. At the time of its collapse, Lehman Brothers had $639 billion in assets, and $619 billion in debt, making it the largest bankruptcy filing in history. Lehman's collapse also made it the largest victim of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. This paper examines the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the

..although these securitization trusts were based on many unaffordable and unsustainable mortgages, it didn't crumble right away because the companies were gouging so much out of the consumer, they still had a high rate of return" but then housing prices dropped and more and more homes were foreclosed upon (Rayman 2008, p.3). At first "Lehman managed to avoid the fate of Bear Stearns, the other of Wall Street's small fry, which

The reason for this is quite simple: it is more than sure that, in the case Lehman manages the buyout, the former management will no longer have a place to work in. The stockholders do not enter the equation, but do negotiate the price of their shares. The interesting aspect is the way Lehman can come up with a sum large enough to cover all of the stockholders' financial demands.

Lehman Brothers, once a global financial behemoth, collapsed in 2008, triggering a severe financial crisis. The company's downfall was largely attributed to poor leadership and decision-making (Egan, 2009). Richard Fuld: The Imperious CEO Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers from 1993 to 2008, was a highly ambitious and competitive executive (Grigoriadis, 2009). He was known for his autocratic management style and his tendency to ignore dissenting opinions (Egan, 2009). Fuld's obsession