SEC judge bars "Big Four" China units for six months over audits

By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Chinese units of the global "Big Four" accounting firms should be suspended from auditing U.S.-listed companies for six months, a judge in the United States ruled, in an escalation in a long-running dispute over regulators' access to documents. In a harshly worded 112-page ruling, Securities and Exchange Commission Administrative Law Judge Cameron Elliot censured the Chinese affiliates of KPMG, Deloitte & Touche, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst and Young. Elliot, an SEC judge who operates independently, sided with the SEC and said the companies "willfully" failed to give U.S. regulators the audit work papers of certain Chinese companies under investigation for accounting fraud. They're putting pressure on us because they think we can influence the regulators in China, which is absolutely not correct," said Paul Winkelmann, the partner in charge of risk and compliance for PwC in Greater China.