Electronic And Paper Document Retention And Auditors’ Responsibilities

Abstract

The issue of the destruction of documents raises many ethical and legal problems for the auditing profession. Such an issue needs to be examined more closely to explore its ethical and legal implications, and to address the more technical issue of how to retrieve the destroyed electronic documents. The purpose of this research paper is twofold. The first is to examine the auditors’ ethical responsibilities regarding the retention of the electronic and paper documents related to an audit engagement, using the Enron case as a practical case for analysis. The second is to discuss methods of retrieving different types of destroyed electronic documents.