CPA's Civil Liability on Financial Statement Audit Failure

• Main Authors: Mei-Ru Hu, 胡美如
• Other Authors: In-Jaw Lai
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/80778353828728404058

碩士 === 中原大學 === 財經法律研究所 === 102 === The very value of profession to certified public accountants is to govern auditing and attestation of financial statements; meanwhile, the accountants need to propose proper opinions of their writing. Most of the investors do not know about the information relating to the financial statements of its company as well as a certified public accountant does, so they count on his or her professional ability. That’s why a certified public accountant has liability for damages to the investors if he or she issues audit failure of financial statements. This thesis consists of Five Chapters, which is based on ROC Securities and Exchange Act, article 20-1. In the First Chapter, introduction, are preface, motivation, the purpose of the study, the field and framework of research, and the method of the study. Financial statements are the initial topic in Chapter Two, where the juridical relation between certified public accountants and their examinates as well as what a financial statement making in accordance with ratio juris is, the principals of accounting, the definition, contents, auditing and writing of a financial statement are followed to be talked over. The Third Chapter consists of discussing the regulations for issuing audit failure of financial statements, reparation obligors and compensation claimants, the comparison with ROC Securities and Exchange Act, article 32, and the way to identify and probate the audit failure of financial statement, the application of causation, and so on. Firstly, reparation obligors includes accountants, issuers, chairman, president, and signature staff. Each of them has different behavioral aspects and responsibility requirements which depend on the obligor’s position. Compensation claimants are bona fide acquisitors, bonorum venditios and holders. Secondly, audit failure of financial statements how to identify and who to probate. Finally, causation was divided into transaction causation and loss causation. The former was to study the efficient capital market hypothesis, fraud-on-the-market theory, constructive transaction causation, and so forth；the latter was to discuss whether to adopt strict construction or liberal construction to identify loss causation. The explanation and application for the topic here has great influence on judgments; therefore, it is necessary to study. The related topic about counting damages was discussed in Chapter Four. Not only proportionate liability in ROC but also the gross income loss and out-of-pocket method in America were referred to the method applied in this paper because such regulations are unavailable in ROC. The related topic in this paper included the application of offset to the negligence and offset to the loss, limitation in law, whether claimant to the Certified Public Accountant Act and civil law claims. The last part, Chapter Five, comes the conclusion of the paper. Some suggestions in law to the problems that were discussed above were proposed.