Roars on Auditor Liability
Concurring Opinions:
Amid revolutionary proposals to renovate US financial regulation, auditing firms continue to push for caps on their liability for bothced audits. In a report to the Treasury Department’s Committee on the Auditing Profession, the profession’s lobbying affiliate, Center for Audit Quality, collates pending cases against large firms to dramatize their campaign.
They report 90 pending cases asserting aggregate damages exceeding $140 billion, with a third of the cases seeking more than $1 billion apiece and 7 alleging more than $10 billion. The firms say these claims, altogether, support their view that their liability exposure is unfair to them and dangerous for the financial system. The only solution, they urge, is having Congress set statutory dollar caps on claims against them, along with exclusive federal jurisdiction over these cases using a light standard of liability, scienter instead of negligence.