The SEC’s charges against Deloitte’s former Vice Chairman Tom Flanagan were settled on August 4th. The complaint, filed in a District Court in Chicago where Mr. Flanagan resides, details what the SEC could prove, within a reasonable amount of time. There were many more instances of illegal and unethical activity alleged by Deloitte in their […]
There’s a great new update on the story of PwC’s cuts of more than 500 internal IT professionals in the Florida and Atlanta markets. It was written by Jeff Harrington at the St. Petersburg Times on Sunday August 8th. Harrington focuses primarily on the local impact of the cuts. He finds evidence that PwC promised […]
California Lawyer has a feature this month on “Ponzi’s Auditors” and I have two nice quotes. I’m talking about auditors’ responsibility for detecting fraud under SAS 99 and the doctrine of “in pari delicto” as it relates to the AIG case against PwC currently under review by the New York Court of Appeals. …The SEC […]
I was linked to March 23, 2010 in the Times of London UK on the Lehman story as the source for EY’s response to audit committee members regarding the Lehman bankruptcy examiner report. Ernst & Young defended its work in a letter sent by several audit partners to the firm’s key clients and vowed to […]
It’s been my great pleasure to get to know Ryan Chittum, the reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review’s (CJR) The Audit, a blog devoted to the critical look at business journalism. Ryan and I have not yet met in person, but The Audit is a daily must read. I did have the opportunity to meet […]
Paul Barrett of Business Week wrote a great profile last week of Senator Ted Kaufman, Vice President Joe Biden’s replacement in the US Senate for Delaware. I was quoted twice. Some proponents of stricter financial oversight see Kaufman, an obscure back-bencher, as an unlikely hero. “It’s so rare for an appointed senator to do so […]
I’m quoted today in a great new piece by Louise Story and Eric Dash entitled, “Lehman Used ‘Alter Ego’ To Transfer Risks.” “How can anyone — regulators, investors or anyone — understand what’s in these financial statements if they have to dig 15 layers deep to find these kinds of interlocking relationships and these kinds […]
I’ve been quoted today in a stellar piece by Paul Barrett, an Assistant Managing Editor at Business Week on Anton Valukas. Valukas is the Lehman Bankruptcy Examiner, a Chicago guy, and Managing Partner of law firm Jenner & Block.
DUBIOUS BEHAVIOR
What Valukas brought to the endeavor was a no-nonsense lack of deference toward Wall Street game playing, says Francine McKenna, a former director at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “That’s a Chicago thing,” adds McKenna…
Alex Howard’s story discusses the impact of the Supreme Court case re: the PCOAB on IT compliance. Article contains several quotes from me and the rest of the great story, including tons of resources to catch up on this issue .
“Francine McKenna, a sharp-eyed observer of Big Four machinations on her re: The Auditorsblog site, offered a trans-Atlantic view of the deal: “With everything going on here, Deloitte is probably in the worst shape of the Big Four. Deloitte lost the most clients through failures and bailouts and are really hurting, with people being laid off […]
Francine McKenna, an ex-PWC director and a fierce critic of the “big four” accounting firms (PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Deloitte and Ernst & Young), believes the Satyam issue raises fundamental questions of oversight. She says: “It’s hard to know the extent to which there was complicity between the auditors and senior management or whether it was plain […]
If the New Century trustee is successful, ”it may embolden others to look more closely at the possibility of bringing [accounting] firms to some level of culpability for the things that happened,” that led to the credit crisis, Francine McKenna, president of McKenna Partners LLC, a corporate-governance consultancy, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s […]
