MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
The “Big Four” accountancy firms, whose complacency and dereliction of duty were major contributors to the banking crisis that tipped the UK into recession, could be getting their comeuppance at the hands of the European Union.
The story of Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PWC and their obliviousness to malfeasance and fraud in the banking sector in the bubble years has not been sufficiently told. They didn’t raise any red flags about the massive risks that were building up in the financial system. And they gave a clean bill of health to numerous diseased brands including HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland weeks before the undertakers arrived.
Why did they lose their professional scepticism? Because in the 1980s the larger accountancy firms made a conscious decision to transform themselves into vast and multi-tentacled commercial firms. In such a structure, boring old audit gets used as a “loss leader” to secure more lucrative consultancy and advisory work. This creates clear scope for conflicts of interests, with audit partners sometimes tapped on the shoulder and told to ‘go easy’ for fear the firm will lose business elsewhere.
Comments
In the end it reads like just a maybe but at least the problem is being recognized and discussed.
by EmmaZahn on Sun, 10/02/2011 - 9:27pm