Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Prof. Cherny's Principles of Auditing Assignment and filings re: Star Technologies

As previously mentioned in a several posts last month, some auditing students of Prof. Cherny are trying to get financial and other information about some companies that were involved in audit failures. One is Star Technologies. Many of these companies are no longer publicly traded so their filings are not available on Hoovers or Thomson. I found Star's filings on the SEC website in their older Edgar filings. Excerpts from the filings may also be located on Compustat. If the ticker is needed, the lookup on Compustat might work. Otherwise, I went to Factive, searched for news articles on the company, and located the ticker symbol, and then searched on Compustat.

The professor does not expect the students to purchase filings. He explained to me that the students should explain what information they were able to find and how they made use of it. He said in real life you frequently don't have complete information on which to make decisions. (The summaries of the audit failures give some details about the work conditions that the auditors face. Sometimes the companies/officials weren't very open about their information.)

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