On Friday I did a post for Jr Deputy Accountant on Accounting “Irregularities” on the Rise in the Recession after I saw a piece in Reuters about battered financial statements:
Corporate balance sheets may be showing signs of the wear and tear from the prolonged U.S. recession as accounting irregularities are starting to surface at growing numbers of U.S. companies.
Going Concern also covered this so it’s been decided by the blogosphere that this one deserves your attention.
Friend of both yours truly and Going Concern, Financial Armageddon’s Michael Panzner caught this tale and tied it in to one he’d done the day before on banking shenanigans.
In yesterday’s post, “Bad C’s,” I highlighted a few reports that lent further weight to the notion that the financial sector has not been a paragon of virtue, to put it mildly. Yet while many banks and brokers have engaged in some pretty bad behavior — which, among other things, helped bring about the worst financial crisis this century –they are apparently not the exceptions to the rule, as jr deputy accountant reveals in “Accounting ‘Irregularities’ on the Rise in the Recession”:
Reuters is reporting accounting fudging and fraud are on the rise in the US as a result of “pressures” for companies to perform despite the hostile economic environment.
The previous post he refers to sums it up nicely:
In an interesting twist of fate, the firms that have traditionally decided who should get credit have been put in the position of needing extraordinary amounts of other people’s money just to stay alive. Unfortunately, based on what we’ve seen so far, including reports like those that follow, it’s doubtful whether most, if not all, of today’s troubled financial institutions would even qualify for a loan based on traditional measures of suitability — like “character,” for example — if their friends in high places weren’t so intimately involved in the process.
Going Concern agrees in “Homebuyer Credit to Continue Helping People Get into Crazy Debt?”
Worse, large banks (or rather Regions Financial) are willing to lend to bankrupt municipalities and bank regulators will not step in and say “Hey, WTF are you doing?” (yes, I’m talking to you, Atlanta Fed). This is your bank and it’s quite obvious even to the common man what they are doing – you don’t loan money to someone who has no money and has not paid their sewer bill in 16 months. Red flag!
It’s ugly out there and it doesn’t appear to be getting any prettier any time soon.
Oh and Economic Populist has some additional ideas on the subject. You’re welcome.
PwC has launched a new HR service in India and one can only speculate as to the inspiration behind staging the move there (I’ll give you a hint: it starts with Satyam and ends in fraud) but let’s take a look at the official spiel before we rush to judgment.