Deloitte US partner fined $25,000

A Deloitte & Touche partner who signed off on an erroneous Navistar Financial Corp. financial report will be suspended from auditing public companies for one year and fined $25,000, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board announced Friday.

Christopher Anderson, 46 years old, of Lake Forest, Ill., agreed to the disciplinary action, the board's first to fine an individual since Congress created it in 2002 to inspect and discipline public company accountants. Along with the fine and one-year suspension, Anderson faces an additional one-year restriction that limits him to assisting others in audits of public companies.

Anderson failed to bring "due care and professional skepticism" to Navistar's 2003 results and didn't have enough evidence to issue a clean opinion of them, the oversight board said. It said Navistar and its parent company, truck maker Navistar International Corp. (NAV), discovered nearly $20 million of errors late in 2003 that inflated the finance unit's earnings, and made last-minute, offsetting adjustments to avoid surprising Wall Street analysts. Anderson agreed the errors weren't large enough to be material using a higher-than-usual threshold; under the original threshold, the errors would have been material, according to the oversight board. The bulk of the errors involved holdings by Navistar's financial unit in previously securitized loans and leases.

Navistar, a longtime Deloitte client, restated earnings in 2005 for 2002, 2003 and most of 2004 and announced the SEC was conducting an investigation of the matter. SEC spokesman John Nester declined to comment on the matter.

Anderson's attorney couldn't be reached immediately for comment. Deloitte & Touche issued a statement saying "we are pleased that the PCAOB and Mr. Anderson were able to resolve the matter."

Source: Dow Jones Newswires