Posts

‘Independent’ Directors for the Audit Firms: Much Ado About Nothing”

You might as well be trying to save walruses from an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The Big 4 audit firms’ response plans in the event of catastrophic litigation, if they exist, are likely cookie-cutter boilerplate, out of date, irrelevant and prepared by the same go-to defense lawyers that shill for them and repeatedly negotiate their settlements.

Auditor Independence and Management Consulting – Deja Vu All Over Again

To introduce this topic, let’s start with excerpts from a Frontline series, dated June 2002, Bigger Than Enron. In the segment entitled Congress and the Accounting Wars, the history and politics of independence legislation supported strongly by then SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt and eventually incorporated in the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation of 2002 is described. At the […]