Last week while I was in New York, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Maria Woehr, a Financial Services reporter for The Street.com. We talked for about a half an hour and she’s produced three videos from that material so far.
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 […]
The way I see it, the in pari delicto doctrine is being used like a pair of needle nosed pliers by audit firm defense lawyers to diffuse the bomb – huge liability for some of the biggest frauds in history. The in pari delicto doctrine attempts to pull the auditors’ tails from the fire by excusing any of their guilty acts due to the approval of those acts by potentially equally guilty executives.
KPMG is being sued for $1bn by the liquidators of New Century, the collapsed subprime lender, in the first big case against an auditor arising from the current financial crisis. 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 in the Wall Street Journal.
Financial Executives International has just released the results of their survey, “2009 Top Challenges for Financial Executives,” and it’s quite interesting to see what a difference a year makes.
Update: Chicago’s John “Dr. J.” Najarian co-founder of OptionMONSTER on the need for transparency when the assets bought by the US government are eventually sold. On YouTube. Part 2 from Jon Najarian is here. I have been updating this information throughout the weekend as other banks failed and other deals have been done. A […]
I was in San Francisco September 6-10 for the CFO.com Technology Conference. I’ve already told you the story of how this came to pass. Vinnie Mirchandani is not only smart and good at what he does, he’s a really nice guy. Only thing, Vinnie…Next time stick the GPS device on the dashboard. Watching the driver […]
Funny thing happened last night while chatting with the COO of one of the major hedge funds, a group that has been much maligned lately for being shortys. For the umpteenth time in the last month or so it seems, someone assumed that my partner in our firm (actually my brother) was my husband. “PS. […]
Deloitte is in the news for some significant litigation issues. First the winner. This ruling, I think, will have a big impact on the auditor subprime cases to come. Many of these cases, when it comes to the auditors liability, will be based on whether auditors should have been more diligent, thorough, and hard on […]
You heard it here first… Now it’s news. EU set to crack down on rating agencies Brussels is to unveil “targeted regulatory measures” for credit rating agencies operating in Europe over the next few months in response to anger over their role in promoting the sale of complex structured investments. The moves, to be outlined […]
Arthur Levitt recently gave an interview in a Dutch publication de Accountant. Accountancy Age in the UK highlights some key quotes and provides a link to the full article in English. Levitt comments about the potential need for “audit-only” firms and his encouragement of, “…greater transparency, to understand what condition a firm is in. […]
