One such request is for a third-party verification letter, often referred to as a "
comfort letter."
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.
Underwriters are required to obtain a
comfort letter from the accountants as part of their due diligence under the securities laws.
AICPA members have contacted the AICPA to clarify their professional ethical obligations when asked for "
comfort letters" by lenders and 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
NONE of six suspects identified over the IRA's Shankill Road bomb atrocity received so-called
comfort letters, the High court heard yesterday.
