Study On Certified Public Accountant's Civil Liability

The CPA vocation of our country has a development of more than 20 years since it was renewed in 1981.At first,CPA examines the yearly account report and capital devotion only for foreign capital enterprises. But up to present time, they provide various services to stock companies, aggressive companies and other corporations according to the laws, such as auditing, validating capital, evaluating assets and consulting administration, which indicates the CPA vocation, exerts very important function. And the CPA was considered as"economic policeman". However, after China Securities Regulatory Commission has exposed a series of man-made cases, the public began to doubt the credibility of the audit report submitted by CPA, they also started to reconsider the civil liability of CPA. Although our country has already laid down regulations about the false statements of CPA, they are rather general, flexible, and difficult to be put into practice. There are a lot of difficulties to introducing civil sanction to accountant's supervision. In addition, there is not a system view from the law theorists. The paper tries to study the civil liability of Certified Public Accountant in the union of accounting and law.This paper consists of four parts:the generality of CPA's civil liability; the standard of duty and the burden of proof; the constituting elements of civil liability; the rationalization proposal about the civil liability.Chapter one sets from the beginning of the CPA, probes into the meaning of the CPA's civil liability and development course, and then the author analyzes the nature of the civil liability and the standard of duty. There are several views about the nature of the civil liability in the law theorists, they are"contract liability","tort liability"and"coincide liability". An important reason why this situation forms is that legal protecting modes of the pure economic losses are different in the Continent Law and the British-American Law. In Continent Law country, CPA's civil liability is considered as contract liability, even causing damage of the third person is protected by the agreement or tacit declaration information agreement. But the British-American Law country argues that the CPA's civil liability is tort liability. Although the law of our country is similar to Continent Law country, according to the practice of our country, the author believes that the nature of the CPA's civil liability of our country should be divided into different situations. It's coincide liability for Trustee and tort liability for the third person. Author has also probed into the imputation principle of CPA's civil liability in this chapter. Considering that it is difficult for victims to offer the proof, the CPA should undertake the burden of offering proof.The chapter two is about the constituting elements of civil liability. Author thinks it has four elements: misfeasance; negligence; damages; and causation. In view of the different understanding between law boundary and accountant community to the"falseness"of report of audit, the article carries on the elaboration to theirs different points, and attempts to carries on the coordination for contradiction of the law and accountant. In the question of"mistake", law boundary and accountant community also have the different views, the article carries on renewing the mistake according to theirs different professional characteristics. In the question of"causal relation", the author believes that our country should use"causal relation in condition"by accepting the USA's"Cheat marketplace theory". In chartered accountant's civil liability scope, the harm the author states mainly is the property harm, the loss which refers in particular to the trustee or the third person suffered from the false report.In the third chapter"the damage compensation", author holds the opinion that accounting firm should shoulder the responsibility. We should share the responsibility according to intentionally, the significant error and the ordinary error. Author also introduces several computational methods unified the law of our country.Chapter four analyzes the deficiencies of the relevant laws and regulations in our country, points out that simplicity in current law and the contradictory of the content restrain the bearing of certified accountant's legal liability greatly, and provides several suggestions of perfecting such as carrying out the liability insurance for CPA, stipulating the special litigation time, establishing the system of identifying auditing technique, beginning the new mode of lawyer's firm.