Deloitte US First Female CEO; There’s More We Don’t Know

Wouldn’t it be nice if investors and other interested parties could look up Cathy Engelbert in a public and easily accessible registry and find out about all the audit clients where she has been a lead partner or a Quality Control partner? Has she ever been named in a lawsuit or been sanctioned? Let’s hope not.

Here’s what I think really matters about Engelbert’s appointment.

From my piece at Medium.com.

More important than being a woman is the fact that Engelbert is an audit leader rather than a consulting or tax leader. EY’s chose its new US CEO from its tax lobbying practice. Deloitte’s African-American Midwest leader is from the consulting practice — he replaced three women  — and its “chief inclusion officer” was an up-and-coming woman who came over from Arthur Andersen. Did either of these diverse leaders help Deloitte stay out of trouble with either the New York State Department of Financial Services or all the states that are suing the firm for faulty financial systems implementations?

Given Deloitte’s chronic audit quality issues and global dominance on the consulting side, choosing an auditor to lead the US firm is a move in the right direction. Deloitte has reasserted itself as an audit-first firm.

I only wish we knew more about where its US CEO Engelbert actually audited.

Read the rest at Medium.com, “Deloitte US First Female CEO: We Wish We Really Knew You”.