Accountable Accountants

Unaccountable Accounting, along with the many books, articles, speeches and testimony of Abraham J. Briloff, have raised our consciousness concerning the problems of accounting and auditing. We need, in the wake of the Enron Corporation/Arthur Andersen LLP debacle, to meaningfully respond by making the public accounting firms that audit publicly held corporations accountable. This paper begins the process of making them more accountable to boards of directors, audit committees, and long term shareholders, by developing an empirical measurement of quot;auditor riskquot