The Role of External Auditors in Accounting Essay

The Role of External Auditors in Accounting - Essay Example To prevent moral hazards associated with the auditors’ liability, the British Serious Fraud Office has imposed heavy penalities for swindlers and white collar criminals to shut down or suspend a suspicious business. On the other hand, auditors who are found guilty of professional negligence may end up facing a monetary loss or penalty through punitive fines and/or the confiscation of their license to practice auditing in the United Kingdom. As stated by Michael Power of London School of Economics, â€Å"it may not be reasonable to expect that auditors would be challenging business models directly and raising strategic issues with finance directors, that is not their job and if we want it to be their job then things would have to change quite substantially. The direction of my comment is that we might be expecting too much from this black box [External Audit] in terms of what it actually delivers†. ... Based on the individual roles and responsibilities of shareholders, internal and external auditors, the board of directors, and the CEO, this report will explain the limits in the role and responsibilities of external auditors when it comes to detecting and controlling fraud activities in business. Role and Responsibilities of External Auditors External auditors are professionals who are hired to conduct audit based on the rules or laws on creating financial statements for the government, a private company, or a legal organization (The Institute of Internal Auditors, 2011). According to Kwok (2005, pp. 151 – 161), accounting irregularities can be made for the purpose of tax evasion or theft by creating ghost employees, skimming of the proceeds, or theft of an asset. Specifically in the United Kingdom, the Chartered Accountants or the Certified General Accountants are the group of individuals who are qualified to conduct external auditing. According to Poorter (2008), auditors within the United Kingdom has to perform a special duty of care to a liable third party. It means that the external auditors are made responsible in making fair, just and reasonable treatment to the company’s external shareholders. In case external auditors have a binding contract between the company and the shareholders of the said company, it is a general rule for the external auditor(s) to fulfil his/her statutory duty as an auditor to shareholders collectively or as a group. As a standard operating procedure, external auditors are expected to evaluate the financial statement of another organization on a yearly basis (Hicks and Goo, 2008, p. 261). Upon going through the financial statement of a government, a private company, or a legal organization, external auditors are expected

Use of Lexical Choices and How They Would Affect the Discursive Power Essay

Use of Lexical Choices and How They Would Affect the Discursive Power of Media - Essay Example People seek to reach their aims and goals by using power. In defining power attention must be paid to the fact that it is not something you can simply possess. It is rather a relationship between people. Power is always related to situations. Using power means having the power to persuade and impress through verbal communication. Pekonen (1991, 46) states that modern politics can be explained as a symbolic power struggle: the winner is a party whose language, words, terms and symbolic expressions are dominant once reality and the context have been defined. (Chilton, P. & Ilyin M. p 4) Presidential speeches are very important to society. According to Denton and Hahn (1986), the presidency is a rhetorical institution. Through speeches, a president leads his country and seeks to persuade the nation and society. Presidential power is the power to persuade. The rhetorical style of a presidential speech can directly affect the political speaker's aims and success. Han (1998) believes that the significance of presidential rhetorical skills has increased over the last 50 years and in part because of the media. This conceals some problems: when the style is emphasized, content may have only a secondary role. The images may be stronger than the message, and credibility may be more important than information. In this study, attention is paid to the (d) Meanings Aristoteles le of presidential power and per-suasion especially from the rhetorical point of view. (Aristoteles) Kress (1990) has introduced theoretical criteria characterizing work in the CDA paradigm which distinguishes it from other politically engaged discourse analysis work. (a) Language is first and foremost a type of social practice. (b) Texts are the result of the actions of socially situated speakers and writers. (c) The relations of the participants in the production of texts are generally unequal. (d) Meanings are the result of the (inter)action of readers and hearers with texts and with the speaker/writers of texts. They are always subject to more or less closely enforced normative rules, and to the relations of power obtaining in this interaction. (e) Linguistic features at any level are the result of social processes. Linguistic features are never arbitrary conjuncts of form and meaning. (f) Linguistic features in their occurrence in texts are always characterized by opacity. (g) Users of language have a particular stance towards the set of codes which make up a language. (h) A system of language is highly problematic in CDA. (i) History has to be taken into account. (j) CDA must be based on rather precise analyses and descriptions of the materiality of language on a close linguistic description. (Kress, p 84) CDA begins from the assumption that systematic asymmetries of power and resources between participants - speakers and listeners, readers and writers - can be linked to their unequal access to linguistic and social resources. The important unit of analysis is the text. Texts are taken to be social uses of spoken and written language. Critical discourse analysis focuses on a genre as well as on sentences and word-level analysis. The study of subject positions may clarify traditional values, ideologies and representations. When analyzing the cultural assumptions expressed in a text, one way to do it is to study the lexical choices or grammatical representations of agency and action.