Certified Public Accountant To A Third Party Civil Liability Study

At present CPA industry in our country is still in the developing stage, which is immature comparing with CPA industry developed quite perfect overseas. Especially China has already been the member of WTO, and the foreign accounting firms entering the Chinese market has been settled. The development tendency of international accounting firm in China is swift day by day. The domestic accounting firms will face a more stern challenge. But because lack of the reasonably effective legal model, CPA industry would be falling into a "litigation crisis".This paper tries to discuss accountants' liability on civil laws, and takes the liability to the third parties as the center. The aim of this paper is to provide the basis of law to judge the legal responsibilities of CPA, enhancing the communication between CPA and society, providing the practicable suggestions for the construction of CPA legal system in our country.This paper is divided into three parts.Part one: Taking the relationship of professional responsibilities and legal responsibility as the starting point, this part briefly summarizes the development and changes of CPA professional responsibilities by recalling the history of auditing in the foreign countries. In order to understand the accountants' liability correctly, this part also analyses the history and situation of legal responsibility of CPA in China.Part two: This part discusses the theory basis of the accountants' liability to the third parties. In order to take the experience of foreign countries as a reference, this part compares of the feature and difference of accountants' liability to the third parties among the common law, e. g. U. S. A, civil law, e. g. German, and our law system. After this retrospection, we can find that we should resolve this question on the basis of our own legal system. It is better for us to choose tort law.Part three: This part concentrates on the accountants 'torts and analyzes the three composing important items of the liability, namely the faults, results and the cause and effect relation. Finally, this part probes into the accountants' compensation responsibility for the third parties.Civil liability of the third parties of CPA is not only theory question, also practice question, which involves the overlapping domain of both the Legal science and Accounting. Only then respecting survival rule of another occupation in the legal frame, and carrying on the effective communication, which can make us fair to limits the accountants' civil liability scientifically, and can display watch-dog function of CPA well to the economic life, promote economy to develop in a healthy way.