Wouldn’t it be nice if investors and other interested parties could look up new Deloitte US CEO 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.
A new study says smaller public companies are paying a premium for the prestige of a Big Four auditor but the auditors are dangling small clients as chum for their large acquisitive shark audit clients.
Several recent developments regarding auditor whistleblowers should be of interest to internal and external auditors and compliance professionals, whether they work for a public company or a professional services provider.
British MP Margaret Hodge grilled Kevin Nicholson, of PwC’s UK tax practice, in a Parliament Public Accounts Committee hearing on Monday. You know you’re on your “back foot” when the first thing out of your mouth has to be a denial that you lied under oath. More details about PwC’s tax avoidance scheme for audit client and US government owned AIG.
Update: The PCAOB is investigating PwC for its tax avoidance advice to Caterpillar, the Wall Street Journal is reporting. One down, more than 100+ PwC audit clients advised via Luxembourg to go…
My latest column at Medium.com responds to PwC’s #LuxLeaks defenses: Illegal docs, legal advice. I also raise the obvious auditor independence issues which no one else is reporting.
I’m quoted extensively in an October 2014 The Bottom Line piece on the Big Four expansion into full-fledged legal services.
Did you know that each of the Big Four audit firms and some of the next tier also run SEC-registered broker-dealers? You’ll never guess who audits them.
Anthony Canalungo wrote a really interesting article about Herbalife’s financials in Venezuela. Three different MLM companies from the peer group in addition to Herbalife operating in Venezuela and all except for Herbalife are using SICAD 2. What else do these four firms have in common? Auditor PwC.
Ryan Adams testified on behalf of PwC in an important court case. How can PwC be independent of Adam’s employer Marin Software, and Adams, the Financial Reporting Director at this newly public PwC-audited client company, if he’s testifying on PwC’s behalf in litigation that could impact PwC’s business model in California and, perhaps, nationally?
The NYDFS PwC investigation discovered several emails that Benjamin Lawsky, the Superintendent of Financial Services for New York, characterized Monday as examples of a consultant going along with a “whitewash”.
The August issue of The Bottom Line in Canada includes quite a few quotes and a nice color photo of me in a story about the wave of new consulting firm acquisitions by Big Four audit firms all over the world.
