Team collapse at Richard Wood and Hulme LLP

An “audit failure” is a situation in which a professional auditor fails to detect a material error in the financial statements of the company they are auditing. The audit failure in the situation of Rita Crundwell the failure was exacerbated by the fact that the auditors continually signed off on the misstated statements for years. Crundwell is responsible for many of the deficiencies mentioned, such as the missing funds and the incorrect invoices. However, she is not the sole person responsible for this fraud. The lack of internal control is to blame, and this cannot be placed on a single person. The government should have separated duties and used

6) The CPA firm accounting system was flawed and this was shown when the CPA firm failed to test the system. This system was sold to district by the CPA firm performing their audit. It

Overall, there were three “red flags” E&Y was not aware of during the audit. First, they neglected the 500% net income increase from 1999-2001. This should have raised awareness because revenues only increased by 5% during that same period. Second, the internal auditors were denied access to some of the corporate ledgers. E&Y should have seen this as being one of the largest red flags. Third, the audit team failed to properly investigate employee complaints.

As indicated by PCAOB, the written representation cannot be a substitute for substantive procedures. Thus, auditors did not perform adequate procedures to test the management’s estimates. What’s more, inquires were heavily relied on the management’s integrity. Auditors ignored the professional skepticism. Finally, the 30 years and 15 years useful lives, which were adopted previously by Little Drummer, were not appropriately audited. Since the engagement team did not contact the predecessor auditors, the team did not get any audit documents from predecessor auditors regarding the assumptions of 30 years and 15 years. There was no evidence to show the reasonableness of these two assumptions.

) There was a lack of adequate cut-off procedures to ensure the timely recording of certain period-end accruals. This resulted in an audit adjustment of $3,578,000. The benchmark for overall materiality is $3,508,000, I would consider the audit adjustment of $3,578,000 a material misstatement. Control environment, principle 2 the board of directors and management exercise oversight of development and performance of internal controls. Due to the severity and material weakness of lack of adequate cutoff procedures to ensure timely recording of period end accruals. Management and the board of directors should evaluate performance of internal control activities including adherence to standards of conduct and expected levels of competence. In

Arthur Andersen (AA) contributed to the Enron disaster when it has failed to the management by failing to have Enron establish and enforce its own internal control. There has been flaws to AA‘s internal control. There has been assumption that AA partners were too motivated by revenue recognition thus, overlooking several criteria when providing their services to Enron. Additionally, AA also recognised the retention of audit clients as vital and a loss of any clients would be disadvantaged to an auditor’s career. In AA internal control, the person who is able to make most of the decisions is the person who is most concerned about the revenue or losses of the client’s company.

Instability of the management, laying more stress on general leadership experience, and "fitness program" led to inefficiency and low moral/accountability among staff.

6. This article was written before the accounting laws were changed because of problems encountered by ex-auditors working at the client, and having connections with the new auditors. This caused many problems exemplified by Enron and WorldCom. That is why it is no longer allowed to take a job with the client. I agree with the law at present, based on the fact that before the law was present, major fraud occurred that could’ve been prevented had hiring their old auditors been illegal and of course many

4) What factors in the auditor-client relationship create a power imbalance in favor of the client? Discuss measures that the profession could take to minimize the negative consequences of this power imbalance.

The first is that raised cost through the additional time spent and additional set up costs as well. It affects in both auditors and managers of firms. For the manager, ‘New auditors, they argue lack sufficient knowledge regarding firm-specific risks and, as a consequence, audit failures would likely increase.’ (782, purple) Supposing firm does not need to change related audit company, auditors might know better about firm specific expertise as well as they might not be fully understand of financial statements. For the auditors, if compulsory audit firm radiation implemented under the government regulation, new audit firms should investigate new client to analyze their characteristics and management flows. Therefore it could be concluded that will be high costly because of additional costs such as human resources and time to catch up compared with keeping one audit firm

The analyzed case study refers to the Hollate Manufacturing company, which belonged to the home construction industry since 1950s. The company operated in the United States and Canada with 14 divisions spread throughout the countries. Hollate’s performance was significantly better than its peers, resulting in $1 billion sales. The company maintained its growth over the years due to growth-through-acquisition strategy. However, the home construction industry suffered downturn in recent years. Hollate manufacturing faced a problem with audit as far as with personnel. Four suggestions are given along with answer to the question how to avoid alike situations.

On the Maxwell & Co. side of the Craftset assignment, there was more than one accountant assigned to the client, and there was a Senior accountant who provided supervision. Therefore, there was some segregation of duties and a senior member of the firm to verify that all work is being done correctly. With no room to wiggle, she did just enough to be able to keep focus on Rusher.

The main problems of the organization were that the company set strategies to achieve objectives that weren’t focused in the core business and set without considering how many resources and skills does the company would need to reach them, focusing their efforts in processes or products that didn’t add value to the company and decreasing the profits of the

Assigned auditors were more than aware of the accounting misrepresentation of financial statements, overstating net income. Still instead of walking away from the client and resign, Andersen in pursuing short-term goals stayed with the company and moreover played by the Giant’s rules. More and more accounting firms at that time started to provide consulting services along with auditing to the same companies which always indicates a conflict of interests. Auditors are the guardians and rules players where consultants are giving advices and showing how to avoid some accounting oversights. Andersen also in order to make good profits stepped on the side of combining two contradicting to each other services. Waste Management had lots of former Arthur Andersen employees which also led to close ties between two companies. That situation undoubtedly led to inability to turn down fraudulent accounting practices Waste Management was exercising at that time for a long period of time.

To make matters worse, when Andersen found problems in the financial statements, they didn’t make corrections due to a conflict of interest. The concern was that if Andersen brought these problems to light, Enron would walk away and cost Andersen millions of dollars in the long run. Andersen contemplated dropping Enron as a client, but did not follow through with it. Because the audit and consulting was done at the same firm, it clouded Andersen’s judgment. Andersen employees in Houston began shredding documents and therefore brought obstruction of justice charges that destroyed the firm.