SEC Enforcement Actions Against Auditors: Auditing Education Linked to the Pitfalls of Audit Practice.

The SEC's Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAER5) describe cases of fraudulent financial reporting. In many of these cases, the auditor is disciplined because of a failure to meet professional standards. The use of SEC materials in the accounting curriculum has frequently been advocated in recent years by Robert J. Sack and SEC officials at numerous American Accounting Association meetings. This article describes methods for using releases in the auditing course. Our framework divides the auditing course into four basic sections and provides core discussion questions relevant to AAERs involving auditors. We identify AAERs relevant to the four sections of the auditing course. For seven AAERs, we provide cases with discussion questions and teaching notes. We have also developed a list of AAERs which describes the main issues and classifies them according to our framework.