On Rock Music and Patrick Fizgerald

Sometimes I feel like Don Quixote, flailing about at imaginary windmills. It’s a strange passion to have, wanting to write about the business of the Big 4. But someone has to do it and I’m glad I have some company.

But as I mentioned in the interview I participated in recently, another increasingly less hidden purpose of this blog is to write about things I am interested in. I’ll try to write in an interesting and funny way. Another blog has characterized me on their blogroll as satirical. I am not sure I like that label any more than I liked when the Bank Lawyer gave me a backhanded compliment by making people fear me. But when you get your highest number of comments writing about Led Zeppelin and thousands of new visitors (a big increase from the hundreds who typically visit each day) by expressing your inexplicable carnal desire for a pastey-faced white boy…. Well, it gives one pause.

I hadn’t heard of the blogs Cursor.org, War and Piece and Talking Points Memo before Friday.

It turns out that Laura Rozen is the fiercely intelligent wife of an epistolary acquaintance, Mike Evans of Approva Audit Trail fame. Mike and Laura found my anticipatory post about PJ very funny and Laura decided to give me a link. Then Talking Points Memo linked to me directly and credited War and Piece for the connection. But first David Kurtz, one of their writers, emailed me to make sure the scooter story was really true!

The Cursor.org linked on July 21 to my Fitzgerald scooter post while posting about Valerie Plame’s lawsuit being dismissed.

All three of these blogs are heavy duty, high visibility political blogs. Although my post about Patrick Fitzgerald had nothing to do with the Big 4 directly, he was certainly in our hearts and minds in Chicago because of his recent conviction of Conrad Black. The Conrad Black trial is another example of corporate kleptocracy, a term inspired by the Tyco case, which interestingly enough also had an oblivious auditor. It is also one of the most egregious examples of the failure of “tone at the top” as a critical component of a company’s internal control environment and of the failure of an audit committee to exercise their duty of basic corporate governance.

So, it is by writing about what I am interested in and what I like that I have gained a few more readers’ attention to what I believe is a vitally important issue for stakeholders of the modern public corporation – the increasingly common failure of the Big 4 to meet their professional responsibility to safeguard shareholders’ interests.