A Study On The Civil Liability Of Auditing Tort For Certified Public Accountants

With the development of the market economy, the public realized the important role of the audit function in a market economy. When the damage occurred, the auditor was blamed by the public, which is all because of the importance function of audit in the market economy.There have been numerous financial scandals across the globe,such as the "Yinguangxia event"and"the Kelon event in China," Enron "and" Lehman "in USA.Investors not only lost money in the financial scandals but also lost the confidence with the market. People wish to impose the tort liability on audit. On the one hand, to compensate the investors’ loss;on the other hand,to press audit increasing the quality of the audit and to restore market confidence.Auditor shall bear tort liability,we must first clearly apply what attributable to the principle of responsibility. About imputation principle there are still different views. Due to the complexity of the audit activities, making a lot of difficulties identified in the judicial practice is an infringement exists. How to allocate the issue of compensation after the establishment of the tort liability, there are also more controversial. The process of audit has its own characteristics, the simple general tort liability rules will lead to unfairness. This article based on the theory of civil law, combined with the characteristics of the audit activities as well as the problems exposed in the judicial practice of registered accounting and auditing tort liability. There are three parts:The first part of this article discusses the theoretical circles to explore different points of view of the principle of culpability.Tort principle of attribution of auditor, pointing out that the Auditing violations should adopt the principle of presumption of fault in China.The second part of this article focuses auditor in the constituent elements of tort liability fault identification and the identification of the causal relationship, pointing out that the fault Identification Standards is based on Independent Auditing Standards audit process, combined with the analysis of fault identification of audit process. The causal relationship shall learn from the analysis of the dichotomy of the common law cause of the fact that-for legal reasons.The third part of this article:Analysis of the auditor in different circumstances with civil liability form, which points out that the audit process deliberately untruly reports shall be jointly and severally liability. In case of negligence, the liability shall be born by shares issued.