Robert Ricketts, Texas Tech University and Rawls College of Business accounting department chairman, invited me to speak at his school last April. Here’s a link to the presentation, an excerpt and some additional comments on recent news.
Lofty goals like EY’s Vision 2020 serve a promotional purpose to attract top talent, and create the rationalization for promises of vast internal opportunities to keep top performers engaged. But unintended consequences would likely foreclose any real possibility that the $50 billion aspect of EY’s 2020 strategic plan could be executed as currently conceived.
It’s important for the integrity of the capital markets to assign individual responsibility for audit failures. We need to see the key partners’ names and their career histories because recidivist partners are hiding behind the firms which are very good at dodging general liability.
I have been named a finalist for UCLA’s Gerald Loeb Awards for my work in Forbes magazine last year. I’m a “professional who writes” but also a professional writer and a journalist. You’ve been warned.
This is the fourth big insider trading case in the least few years against a senior tenured partner that betrayed the public’s trust. In none of the cases did the firm’s “extensive” and “comprehensive” independence compliance programs spot the behavior or the illegal actions. Stay tuned. There will be much more to this story, I guarantee.
This post about Ernst & Young’s aggressive tax advice to audit client Wal-Mart was originally posted October 29, 2007. It’s worth everyone – I’m talking to you SEC and PCAOB – taking another look at this given Wal-Mart’s new Mexican bribery problems and the SEC investigation of Ernst & Young for tax lobbying to audit clients. (Ernst & Young has been silent and left out of most media discussion about Wal-Mart’s FCPA problems in Mexico and elsewhere.)
I’m in San Diego at the Accounting Program Leaders Group/Federation of Schools of Accountancy annual seminar. I spoke Sunday on the profession and its professionals.
The issue of tax avoidance by corporations is a hot one. In the US and in the UK, legislators and pundits seeking “tax justice” have changed the discussion from one of tax breaks that stimulate “jobs and growth” to one of tax fairness to provide much needed funds for public works and public commitments in times of economic hardship. The Big Four audit firms play all sides like a fiddle.
You can’t throw a rock at a fraud or scandal nowadays without hitting three, sometimes all four, of the largest global audit firms providing one service or another. The Big Four global accounting firms make money whether clients survive and thrive or flail and fail.
Here’s a compilation – updated – with links for the columns/posts I’ve written about the mortgage servicer foreclosure reviews mandated by the April 2011 SEC/Fed consent orders, the April 2012 Attorneys General mortgage settlement and the intersection of the two regulatory actions.
I was in New Orleans this past long Martin Luther King Day weekend to speak at the American Accounting Association Auditing Section Midyear Conference. Here are my slides and text of my remarks.
It’s easy to forget, with all the propaganda being published by major media, why these Fed/OCC consent decrees were issued in the first place. The fact that a borrower may be in default does not negate the overwhelming evidence that court cases have provided that banks proceeded fraudulently and illegally in some foreclosures and looted those borrowers and institutional investors in mortgage securities by charging fraudulent and illegal fees in the process.
