Courtesy of Neil McIntyre’s Weekend Reading, I came across a report by Al Lewis of the Denver Post entitled: Fraud too pervasive to roll back SarbOx. Al says that a survey into fraud or regulatory enquiry:
Big accounting firms – including Arthur Andersen, KPMG, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young and Price Waterhouse – were implicated in 18 percent of the cases, the study said. (Grant Thornton, which sponsored the study, is not mentioned, but it has had similar issues.)
I’m not surprised. I’ve said it many times before but it is worth the repeating. Without a separate ethics exam as a core part of qualification, new practitioners have no foundation in what it means to operate in a manner that instils public confidence. OK – so ICAEW is imbuing exams with ethical components but I find it hard to understand how that will work. But I think there are other factors in play.
The Big Four have carved up the FTSE 350 among themselves, arguing the complexity and global presence cards as reasons why they are best qualified to handle these companies. While this seems a compelling argument, it isn’t actually true. In putting this argument forward, they are putting about the notion they are single entities. But when you dig beneath the surface, you quickly find they are nothing of the sort. They are loose associations of individual participating firms.
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