Olympus Clears Outside Audit Firms

Olympus has cleared the Japanese affiliates of KPMG and Ernst & Young in a report by an outside panel investigating the camera and medical device maker’s cover-up of $1.7 billion in losses.

A panel of lawyers hired by Olympus found in a report released Tuesday that KPMG Azsa and Ernst & Young ShinNihon had not violated their fiduciary duty to the company, according to The New York Times. The report found that Olympus executives had hid the losses to such an extent that the auditing firms could not uncover them. KPMG also allegedly received confirmation statements from Olympus’s banks, Société Générale and Commerzbank, that helped back up the claims.

The panel instead blamed Olympus’s internal auditors and said one of the former auditors who was in charge of the accounting department was responsible for almost half the approximately $109 million in costs related to the cover-up. Olympus has filed a lawsuit against five of its internal auditors.

Earlier this month the company filed suit against its former chairman and several other top executives (see Olympus Sues Executives over Accounting).

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