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(From Financial Director)
Byline: John Sterlicchi, San Jose.
External auditors and their clients are facing dozens of rule changes, which are being proposed for discussion by the Securities and Exchange Com-mission in the wake of the Enron, WorldCom and Tyco debacles.
Yet not one of those new rules addresses the basic issue inherent in the relationship between a corporation and its auditors, which is that the corporation pays the external auditors and no matter how much the latter protest their independence there is a clear conflict of interest.
Eliminating this conflict has, for many years, occupied the thoughts of Joshua Rouen, the Professor of Accounting at the Stern School of Business, New York University and he believes he has come up with a workable solution.
He has developed an idea for "Financial Statements Insurance (FSI)," which is a way of changing the employer of the auditors and thereby ending the conflict of interest.
Instead of hiring external auditors, corporations would be obliged by, for instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission to buy FSI, which would indemnify investors against losses suffered because of shenanigans in corporate reporting and auditing.