The way I see it, the in pari delicto doctrine is being used like a pair of needle nosed pliers by audit firm defense lawyers to diffuse the bomb – huge liability for some of the biggest frauds in history. The in pari delicto doctrine attempts to pull the auditors’ tails from the fire by excusing any of their guilty acts due to the approval of those acts by potentially equally guilty executives.
Arthur Levitt recently gave an interview in a Dutch publication de Accountant. Accountancy Age in the UK highlights some key quotes and provides a link to the full article in English. Levitt comments about the potential need for “audit-only” firms and his encouragement of, “…greater transparency, to understand what condition a firm is in. […]
J. Robert Brown over at Race To The Bottom is always good for thought-provoking insightful posts. That is if you like that sort of thing rather than short, tongue-in-cheek, throwaways. Which I do. So I have to have a “Black Eye” not a “Red Eye” before I sit down to see if he’s written anything new […]
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” -Aristotle Although I usually agree wholeheartedly with Jonathan Weil, I […]
