Page 12 - Auditors Article

However, this would still require the auditors to fulfil their

contractual obligations.

Anyone in business selling a product must ensure that their

product is fit for purpose and will not cause injury to their

customers. This fundamental of contract between producer
and user however does not apply to auditors whose

heterodoxy is supported by a dearth of constraining liabilities.

Moreover, the victims of these failures have “no legal recourse
to seek compensation because auditors owe a “duty of care”

only to the company that hires their services, not to any

individual stakeholder or creditor.” [Sikka, P., 2019]

The question that may be asked is “who benefited from the

undeclared and unreported overdrafts?” It is unlikely that this

question will be answered until those arrested come to court.
But, on balance, it is unlikely that one individual could

perpetrate this level of fraud and the thousands of individual

actions that underpinned it.

Appendix 10 of the case study [Gallagher, J., 2020] shows that “The

Chief Financial Officer supports the Chief Executive Officer and
is responsible for the financial governance of the Company.”