Digging through the mailbag, I found this little gem:
I'm not surprised broker dealer audits are bad. I used to be on a high profile one and let me tell you I spent so much time to trying to understand the business. At the end of the day, you get a general idea as to the operations BUT almost every time, when you dive into the details, its still a black box. Often times, the details would contradict with the general understanding. This was pervasive all the way up to the partner level. At the end of the day, we just put tickmarks on the stuff we didn't understand and said it agreed to the financial statements with no consideration to risk. Too bad, my methods would've saved the company from being in the news this year in a bad way.
Do you have a story of rampant ghost-ticking to get an engagement done? Email us your stories.
Britain’s top accountants are to have their own books scrutinised after the consumer watchdog referred the business of checking companies’ figures for a full-scale competition inquiry. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said it had been concerned for some time that the audit market is highly concentrated with low levels of switching and substantial barriers to entry. The watchdog estimates that in 2010 the “big four” firms, PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and Ernst & Young, earned 99% of audit fees paid by FTSE 100 companies, while between 2002 and 2010 only 2.3% of FTSE 100 firms changed their auditor. [