Waterbury regional lender Webster Financial Corp. has fired Ernst & Young as its auditor the past four years and hired rival KMPG LLP, a regulatory filing shows.
According to Webster’s latest 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the parent of Webster Bank said its board’s audit committee chose KPMG after a competitive process to find a firm to oversee the mandatory audit chores that publicly traded companies must undergo to satisfy regulatory requirement.
Webster said in the filing it notified E&Y on Monday that it was being dropped.
“We regularly put our major vendor contracts out to bid,” said Webster spokesman Brenda Greene.
Recently, Webster dropped ad agency KSV Associates, of Boston, as its agency of record, for SapientNitro, also of Boston, Greene said.
Webster’s filing Indeed, the bank insists in the filing that E&Y’s audits for 2010 and 2011 “did not contain an adverse opinion or a disclaimer of opinion and were not qualified or modified as to uncertainty, audit scope or accounting principles.”
Greene declined to say how much E&Y was paid for its services.
E&Y’s Hartford office had no immediate comment. KPMG’s Hartford partner in charge didn’t immediately return a phone call for comment.
Stockholders will vote whether to formally engage KPMG at their April 25 annual meeting in Waterbury.
