Sorry, the Auditor Said, but We Want a Divorce

A New York Times article relating the difficulty experienced between companies and their Auditors at this current compliance situation:

HOWARD ROOT, chief executive of Vascular Solutions, was stunned when Ernst & Young, the Big Four firm that had been its auditor since it was founded in 1997, quit without warning less than three months before Vascular's annual report was due.

Root told the New York Times that Ernst & Young said it quit the account because it didn't have enough people to handle the mountain of extra work created by the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate watchdog act - especially for smaller clients like Vascular Solutions, which had net sales of around $20 million last year. The Sarbanes-Oxley law, passed in 2002, tightens accounting procedures and imposes new reporting rules on publicly traded companies and their outside auditors.

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