Auditors are potentially liable for both criminal and civil offences. The former occur when individuals or organisations breach a government imposed law; in other words criminal law governs relationships between entities and the state.
The auditor has a duty to employ such skill with reasonable care and diligence. The auditor undertakes his task(s) with good faith and integrity but is not infallible. The auditor may be liable for negligence, bad faith, or dishonesty, but not for mere errors in judgment.
The auditors' duty of care Their audit report is addressed to all shareholders. Auditors do not owe a duty of care to individual shareholders. A statutory right of shareholders to put questions to auditors may potentially widen that duty of care to each shareholder asking a question.
Yes, the auditors can be held responsible for making mistake during audit. It is because the auditors are hired to check either the financial statements prepared in the company shows the true financial position and the performance or not. If the auditors do some mistake in this process then it can be held responsible.
Under common law, an auditor can be held liable to its clients for negligence, gross negligence, con- structive fraud, and fraud. Due to the substantive amount of damages that a client can collect in a tort action, clients of auditors would be well advised to gear into tort claims rather than contractual ones.
The auditor will only be liable to third parties if he or she knows (rather than merely foresees) that the information will be given to, and used by, someone other than those for whom it is prepared.
The auditor has no responsibility to plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance that misstatements, whether caused by errors or fraud, that are not material to the financial statements are detected.
An NDA could be unenforceable if it is too broad, is not for a defined time period, covers information that is not confidential, or asks for illegal conduct.
Under Ohio law, noncompetition contracts are generally enforceable if they are reasonable. The question of what's reasonable is a very fact-specific one though. It depends on the particular circumstances of a given situation, and the Ohio Supreme Court has set out a legal test for courts to apply.
In Ohio, employee NDAs are generally legal—but there are certain limits employers should be aware of, and several best practices that will help make the agreement more likely to be upheld if challenged in court.