Получается, что аудитор может отозвать заключение 11 давности, чем это грозит для клиента (абстрактного) и самого аудитора в плане аудиторской практике, регулируется ли это только законодательсвом страны или есть международная практика?
В обших словах, в <U.S.> по крайнеи мере , последствия законодательством не регулируются напрямую, они регулируются профессиональными кодексами, которые примерно одинаковые по странам. Законодательство начинает поджимать косвенно. Вот как примерно выглядят последствия - перехожу на <english>:
<Easy case scenario>
If a client is private, it can leave the financial statements unaudited - and mark them as such when distributing them to 3rd parties. If it's private but its bylaws or partnership agreement call for an annual audit, or worse, for an audit by a <national audit firm>, then the client can try to convince the existing auditor to re-do the job or try to look for another auditor to re-audit the financials. The potential new auditor will do due diligence on the client before taking on the work and likely will not take on the job if there is any hint of fraud/ management misconduct / pending litigation. If it does agree to do the audit, then a new opinion gets issued and the financials are circulated with that opinion.
If the client is public, then the ultimate consequence of a recalled audit opinion is the inability to comply with SEC reporting and with exchange listing rules. Basically, if a company is late in filing a quarterly or annual report (read, it's either not ready, or the auditors refuse to sign off), then a company gets delisted, basically.
On the auditor's side, the partner who signed the opinion that gets recalled will probably get a note on his / her CPA license records in his/her state of practice about the recalled opinion, but that's not automatically the end of the world - the risk of having to recall an opinion is an ongoing occupational hazard.
<Bad case scenario for auditor>
Same as above except there's an allegation that the auditor did not follow "generally accepted auditing standards" / was negligent in its work. These standards are not created by the government but rather by the auditing profession itself (except for post-Sarbanes-Oxley public company audit rules). The shareholders of the client or whoever else placed reliance on the financial statements and suffered financial loss because of that sue the auditor. The auditor's defence will be to prove that it followed the generally accepted auditing standards and any other reasonable auditor would have arrived at the same opinion as it did.
<Bad case scenario for client>
Either the auditor manages to prove the above, or there's an outright allegation of fraud / other improprieties committed by management or the board of directors. The client gets sued by shareholders/ creditors/ whatever. Another bad case scenario is where the statements are used as support for something (like in Yukos' case) and the lack of the audit opinion messes up the strategy.
Кстати вот оригинал от <PwC>:
<24 June 2007 — As a result of recent information that has come to the attention of ZAO PricewaterhouseCoopers Audit (PwC) in relation to OAO NK Yukos (Yukos), PwC has written to the management board of Yukos informing them that the PwC audit reports on Yukos for the periods ended 31 December, 1995–2004 inclusive should no longer be relied upon or associated with Yukos’s financial statements.
PwC decided to withdraw its audit opinions for Yukos when it became aware of new information which had it been known at the time may have affected Yukos’s audit reports. PwC now believes information and representations which was provided to PwC by Yukos’s former management may not have been accurate.
In addition, PwC’s decision to withdraw the reports was influenced by the fact that some former shareholders and management of Yukos are continuing to encourage others to rely on PwC’s audit reports. >
