Reference no: EM131520711

One area of law which has been developing is that of the mass tort and/or class action. For example, tobacco companies won every case filed against them, year in and year out, until they finally started losing when the lawyers got together to attack the tobacco companies. There have been large numbers of lawsuits, or class actions, related to asbestos, lead, pollution (think of the movie "Erin Brockovich"), tires which failed on Ford Explorers, etc.

Assume that you are the in-charge auditor for a client company which does engineering design services for buildings, bridges, roads, port facilities, and other such items. During the year, a pedestrian walkway collapsed; the company had designed it for a stock-car racetrack in North Carolina. 20/20, the Sunday night network television program, showed some on-camera interviews in which someone made the claim that the walkway collapsed because the people who designed it had never had to solve problems while they were in college; instead, all the tests they had taken were multiple-choice tests, and the result was that the people who designed the walkway did not know how to do so properly. In fact, the whole world had evidence that the design was improper, because the ten-month-old walkway had spontaneously collapsed on a clear day with little wind, when nobody was on the walkway. Thus, the designers could not credibly claim that the walkway had been subjected to stresses beyond those it was supposed to have been designed to handle.

Required:

Design an audit program for asserted and unasserted claims against this client company. Cite the authoritative professional literature related to the claims, and show how your audit program fulfills your professional responsibilities.