comfort letter

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Comfort letter

A letter from an independent auditor included in a preliminary prospectus stating that, while a full audit has not been undertaken, the auditor has done a 'review' sufficient to assure that financial statement information in the preliminary prospectus is correctly prepared to the best of the auditor's knowledge. The auditor in effect states that, had a full audit been done, they are comfortable that the audited financial statements would not be materially different from the ones presented in the preliminary prospectus.
Copyright © 2012, Campbell R. Harvey. All Rights Reserved.

Comfort Letter

Before or during a new issue, a statement by an auditor stating that, while a full audit has not been done, a review of the issue's prospectus has revealed nothing inaccurate or misleading. The comfort letter also states that the auditor is confident that a full audit would not uncover anything unusual that would negatively affect the issue.
Farlex Financial Dictionary. © 2012 Farlex, Inc. All Rights Reserved

comfort letter

A statement issued by a Certified Public Accountant declaring no indication of false or misleading information in the financial statements being used in connection with a securities offering.
Wall Street Words: An A to Z Guide to Investment Terms for Today's Investor by David L. Scott. Copyright © 2003 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. All rights reserved.
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One such request is for a third-party verification letter, often referred to as a "comfort letter."
Third-party verification requests
Owing to a succession of minority government during the past several years, it has been difficult for the Government to enact legislation of any stripe, including technical amendments implementing comfort letter interpretations.
TEI liaison meeting with Canadian Department of Finance on pending income tax questions
Underwriters are required to obtain a comfort letter from the accountants as part of their due diligence under the securities laws.
Taking it public: the CPA's various roles in the IPO process
AICPA members have contacted the AICPA to clarify their professional ethical obligations when asked for "comfort letters" by lenders and mortgage brokers.
How CPAs should handle "comfort letter" requests from lenders, mortgage brokers
Since the entry of the present block exemption (Regulation 870/95/EC), the Commission has approved ten consortia under the opposition procedure, and in several other cases DG IV has sent comfort letters confirming that a notified agreement conforms with the block exemption.
SHIPPING/COMPETITION: COMMISSION ABOUT TO PROPOSE EXTENSION TO LINER CONFERENCE BLOCK EXEMPTION
Finally, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) has begun issuing "comfort letters" to potential purchasers stating that the agency has no current plans to pursue enforcement actions against specific owners of contaminated properties when the owners had no involvement in the contamination, and where the contamination is not posing an immediate threat to human health or the environment.
Environmental law update
To a lesser extent, guarantee variants such as keepwell, support and comfort letters are accepted based on the financial strength of the providing party and internal policies of the accepting party.
Derivatives and credit support
The American Institute of CPAs auditing standards board has published two statements on auditing standards relating to agreed-upon procedures engagements and one statement on standards for attestation engagements concerning requests for comfort letters.
AICPA issues auditing guidance
* Comfort letters. In response to input from the lending community and others, EPA has expressed a willingness to make available a "comfort letter" that presumably could be issued to a prospective party to a real estate transaction that is concerned about Superfund liability.
EPA's Brownfields initiatives
While this incident was singular as to its notoriety, the relationship among the parties was representative of cases involving comfort letters: a lender successfully demanding that an interested company provide assurances so that credit be extended to a subsidiary or beneficiary.
Keep-well letters: the elusive contingency
NONE of six suspects identified over the IRA's Shankill Road bomb atrocity received so-called comfort letters, the High court heard yesterday.
'No suspects in Shankill Bomb have OTR letters'

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