CASE ANALYSIS PROCEDURE AND SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

GENERAL

Case analysis involves three general stages: First, motivating the analysis by identifying those institutions and community groups who have fallen victim to a financial failure (typically, in the courts, these victims have recourse because management and others have violated their fiduciary duties). Second, identifying the accounting and audit controls that failed, leading to the contract failures (management and auditors are may be held liable for both in the courts) leading to a description of the kind of accounting and audit controls that were in place, and those that best practice would indicate should have been in place. This general procedure is described in greater detail below.

1. MOTIVATION

Who were the groups, stakeholders, or participants who were adversely affected by the audit failure?  What, specifically, did they lose?  An audit failure may be viewed as a set of contract violations, where “contract” is conceived broadly to include implicit or unwritten understandings as well as written terms.  Both may be legally enforceable. Thus, the first step in case analysis involves describing the various “active” participants in the case, and the dimensions of their contracts in terms of their inducements and obligations. A narrative account of an audit failure (as is frequently reported in the press) is a historical recounting of a sequence of contract violations, one triggering others. For instance, a customer complaints may lead to an exposure of management fraud, prompting an SEC investigation, and a stock price collapse, resulting in stockholder lawsuits, IRS prosecutions, employee layoffs, etc.

2. AUDIT FAILURES DESCRIBED IN TERMS OF CONTROL SYSTEM FAILURES

Audit failures are failures in the system of management control; and frequently the system of internal control.  Management controls cover the entire process of management, from hiring, promotion, production, marketing, invoicing credit checking, etc.  Accounting policies, procedures, and controls are a major component of management’s control system; they are structured around transaction cycles.  The causes of audit failures reside in one or more compromised transaction cycles.  This second phase involves identifying the specific transaction cycles that may be culpable for the failure.  A case analysis requires that these transaction cycles be described in two ways:

• Their Actual
• Their Required or Mandated form.

Use the Internal Control Flowcharts (in Course Documents) to flowchart one or more of the transaction cycles that were compromised.  Provide a flowchart for the “Actual” and the “Required or Mandated Form” of control cycle.

3. PRESENT YOUR EVALUATION AND RECOMMENDATIONS IN THE SPECIALLY CREATED BLACKBOARD FORUM FOR THE PARTICULAR CASE / EXTRA CREDIT ASSIGNMENT.

The primary basis for your “Evaluation and Recommendations” should flow directly from the evidence in the case / video and the (above) comparison between  “actual” and the “Required” /“Mandated” descriptions of the compromised transaction cycles.  Marks will be deducted for offering unsubstantiated opinions and judgments.

You text submission should not exceed 1200 words.  The flowcharts should be created in MS. Word, and submitted as attachments to your Blackboard Forum Submission.  Extra credit will be awarded for CONSTRUCTIVE, HELPFUL, POSITIVE — BUT INFORMATIVE comments on the submissions of your colleagues.

In addition to the submission in the Blackboard Forum, you must download, complete, and submit a hardcopy, in the class following the submission deadline, and Personal Blackboard Submission Form for each Extra Credit assignment.  A copy can be downloaded from Course Documents.

All deadlines for this work are final.

Professor Tony Tinker