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Summary: the mortgage mess happened in 2008 when there was a decreased homing price. However, their mortgage payment by homeowners were soon greater than the price of house. As a result, they forced the repurchase policy of many mortgage agreements, and let the subprime lenders to take over their houses. Subprime lender like New Century became the bankrupt because of the high lost associate with the mortgage cancelation. To maintain earning, the management modify the estimate of its reserve. However, KPGM, the auditor of the New Century is question of their work.
KPMG lost its independence due to its afraid of lost business.
1.The advantages include better understanding of the industry, lower cost because of the reduced amount of work on evaluate the industry, gain great profit when the industry is going up, and early recognition of the industry trend because of the shared information from different companies. The disadvantages include risk of loss profit when the industry go down, create a mind set of doing audit that can be bias, 2.
They need to ensure the information gathered by the prior team is properly communicated and understand by the take over team. As a result, it results in the saving of the time and effort of the take over team to spend. It also gave the new team a different point of view as well as better understanding of the company. on the other hand, they also need to ensure the work quality of the taker over team will not be reduced.
3.Significant deficiency: A significant deficiency is “a control deficiency, or combination of control deficiencies, that adversely affects the entity’s ability to initiate, authorize, record, process, or report financial data reliably in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles such that there is more than a remote likelihood that a misstatement of the entity’s financial statements that is more than inconsequential will not be prevented or detected.” Material weakness: A material weakness is “a significant deficiency, or combination of significant deficiencies, that results in more than a remote likelihood that a material misstatement of the financial statements will not be prevented or detected.” SAS 112 requires the auditor to communicate control deficiencies that are significant deficiencies or material weaknesses in internal control.
Significant deficiencies or material weaknesses must be communicated in writing to management and those in charge of governance–for example, to the audit committee of the board–no later than 60 days following the report release date. Unqualified Opinion can be issued when internal control over financial reporting is effective: no material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting exist as of the fiscal year-end assessment date. 4.The procedures to audit important “accounting estimates” include :considering the relevance, reliability, and sufficiency of the data and factors used by management, evaluating the reasonableness and consistency of the assumptions, and re-performing the calculations made by management. 5.The GAAS require an auditor to exercise due professional care, to adequately plan its audit, to sufficiently understand a business’s internal structure, and to obtain sufficient evidence to reach reasonable conclusions.
KPMG allegedly failed to adhere to the GAAS by having an inexperienced audit team,; failed to challenge New Century management for unreasonable estimates; failed to test the repurchase reserve despite evidence of internal control weaknesses and apparently inaccurate estimates of outstanding repurchase requests; and failed to raise deficiencies and inaccuracies in New Century’s accounting practices or internal controls. 6. Although the investors are complaining that they should be liable for the lost because they did not actively participate in the mortgage market. It is true that they did nothing wrong, but they need to identify this risk when they invest.
Investor does not have enough information about the market trend that should be provided. As a result, they invest the money base on the outdated information. There is no way for them to identify the threat of their investment. 7.1) auditor need to maintain independence from their work, lose of independence can lead to a bias conclusion, which cannot be trusted upon. KPMG’s afraid to lost New Century as a client lead them to issue a report in favor of the management. 2) do not employ inexperience auditor, especially when the company is in its hard time. Inexperience auditor will cause mistake of their work. Company in hard time have a incentive to make fraudulent statement, and inexperience auditor are not able to detect them. 3) be aware when the company going down. The management may try to management the earning in order to meet estimates.
