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The Bell Effect: City of Riverside Won’t Renew With Mayer Hoffman McCann

If you’re a small city in California, you probably won’t be looking to Mayer Hoffman McCann to do your audits. If you’re already with them, it’s time to go auditor shopping.


Following the debacle that was Mayer Hoffman McCann’s completely blown city of Bell audits, the city of Riverside has joined the angry mob and will not be looking to renew with MHM any time soon. Riverside’s CFO Paul Sundeen said “given that the firm’s five year contract with the city is at its end and the controversy at the city of Bell, we will not include them [when seeking proposals for an auditor]”. Sorry, MHM, don’t wait by the mailbox for that invitation because you aren’t invited to the party.

Now that’s not nearly as harsh as getting fired by the client but sends a clear message to MHM (and any other questionably-equipped-to-do-their-job auditors out there) that ineptitude will not fly with the client. Unless, of course, there’s a conspiracy at work to defraud TPTB, in which case ineptitude is totally welcome if not encouraged.

Once again, it comes down to scope. No audit firm should be expected to look at every receipt and every statement but in the case of the Bell audit, auditors obviously missed some very large accounts either on purpose or because the firm sent a bunch of fresh-faced neophytes down there (this rarely happens) to actually perform the audit (Note to MHM: $8.89 million is significant unless you’re auditing the King of Saudi or the Federal Reserve). What happened to the accountability SOX promised us?

Said Riverside city controller Jason Al-Imam, “They want to do the right amount of work because they don’t want to lose their license, but they can’t audit everything. Sometimes something might go wrong and that just might be an area that they didn’t look at.”

Scraping by isn’t doing it anymore for the profession, so Riverside is more than welcome to go track down some new auditors but who wants to bet the kids doing their next audit will be just as fresh-faced and clueless as the last bunch MHM sent to fetch the client’s bank recs and invoices?

City of Riverside to drop Bell’s financial auditor [The Riverside Press-Enterprise]