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Grant Thornton Cuts Ties With Pornhub After Everyone Realizes Pornhub Is Full of Abuse and Illegal Porn

Posted on by Adrienne Gonzalez

So I was gaming with the boys the other day and my buddy asked the squad if we’d seen the stuff about Pornhub. What stuff about Pornhub, you ask? I have to admit that Pornhub isn’t among my multitude of Google alerts (PwC? Yes. Porn? Not so much), therefore as with many things my teammate in his 20s says or does, I was a bit out of the loop on this one.

Apparently, Pornhub deleted something like 70% of its millions of videos. Coom enthusiasts everywhere are comparing it to the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

 

Sure, OK. Although I’m pretty sure the Library of Alexandria wasn’t filled with erotic novels about stepsisters getting stuck in the dryer. I digress.

Forty women are suing Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek over what they say is a “sex trafficking” operation called GirlsDoPorn. If you’re unfamiliar, the whole shtick is getting “normal” (read: non-pornstar) women to, well, you know. On camera.

Pornhub has also been called out for hosting all manner of illegal and immoral content, including content that shows children, unconscious women, abuse … you know, all that fucked-up stuff that people used to seek out in shame but now can find as easily as I can pull up a recipe for drunken keto gummy bears. Internet, huh!

Because this is an accounting tabloid and I’ve already written way too much about the nuance of internet porn videos, I’ll spare you more details than that, but the long and short of it is Pornhub has been in trouble for some time now, only recently has it started really heating up (er …) and it seems Grant Thornton decided it’s time for them to GTFO.

The Times (UK) reports:

Auditors have severed their ties with the owner of Pornhub, the world’s largest pornography website, as a scandal over illegal videos continues to grow.

The accountancy firm Grant Thornton said it would no longer work for MindGeek, a Canadian tech conglomerate, in the UK and Ireland amid claims that Pornhub hosts revenge porn and footage of rape and underage sex.

Mastercard and Visa have already cut ties with the company after the New York Times revealed this month that Pornhub was “infested” with abuse footage. The report claimed the site made money from videos showing “child rapes, revenge pornography, spy-cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags”.

The aforementioned New York Times article can be found here.

Grant Thornton has audited Pornhub parent MindGeek since 2012, and its Dublin headquarters was used as the official address for 11 Pornhub companies.

Look, in a year that’s been mostly terrible for mostly everyone, GT managed to keep it together and even made a little money. It’s unclear how ditching the 10th most popular website in the world as a client will affect the firm, but I imagine from a public relations perspective it might be worth losing the business to no longer be affiliated with a client who profits from misery. It takes a certain kind of balls to drop a client in tumultuous times such as the ones we’re currently living in. Big, swinging, low-hanging balls. Waxed, no doubt, because this is porn we’re talking about after all.

Good on them. Question is, who will pick them up? We can only hope it’s Deloitte.

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Well a few Cherry, Bekaert & Holland interns in the Raleigh office decided to make a video that pimps out the greatest fitness plan of all-time – a summer audit internship – with that same high energy madness. We have to admit we didn’t have high hopes until we actually watched it and let’s just say these interns did not disappoint.

When we asked a CBH spokesperson if these amazing interns will be joining the team come fall, we were told “Full time offers? These are obviously all super-accountants, so I’d be afraid to see what they’d do to us if we didn’t. However, I hear HR is still looking at their before pictures.”

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The Way Things Are Going, Eventually No One Will Have to Comply with Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404

As we trudge toward a Senate vote on he financial reform bill, one issue that is of utmost interest to those in the accounting/audit biz is that of small businesses complying with Section 404(b) of Sarbanes-Oxley.

As it stands, only a small number of non-accelerated filers are voluntarily in compliance with 404. Those not jumping at the voluntarily complying with 404 have enjoyed the repeated delays by the SEC since the legislation was passed in 2002.

But if reform bill passes in its current form, all companies with market caps of less than $75 million will be exempt from complying with the requirement to have an audit of their internal control system. And even those companies that went to the trouble of voluntary compliance, might not continue doing so:

Dan Crow is one of the few small-company CFOs with an auditor’s stamp on his internal controls. Getting it wasn’t as time-consuming or as costly as it would have been several years ago, when large public companies first began complying with one of the most onerous requirements of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, known as Section 404.

Still, Crow, who oversees finance for retailer Hastings Entertainment, doesn’t rule out dropping the extra review next year if Congress decides to permanently exempt small public companies from needing an auditor’s sign-off on their internal controls — as it seems poised to do. The Senate is expected to vote this week on the final version of the financial regulatory reform bill, which would exempt companies with market caps less than $75 million from complying with Section 404(b), the rule in question. (The House has already passed the bill.)

But that’s not all! Because 404(b) is clearly “red tape” (a popular rallying cry in an election year) that provides no benefits whatsoever and just crushes the spirit of small business (the backbone of America, we might add!) Congress has called for a study of “how the ‘burden’ of 404(b) compliance for companies with market capitalization between $75 million and $250 million could be reduced, and whether an exemption for them could increase the number of initial public offerings in the United States,” in the bill.

Christ, where does it end? Let’s just study the whole damn thing over while we’re at it. Apparently the entire Congressional body has completely ignored the benefits of Sarbanes-Oxley; never mind that costs of gone down significantly in the past eight years, making compliance less financially painful.

And not to mention that smaller companies are at greater risk for fraud and accounting manipulation. Look at the roster of companies on Sam Antar’s website and you’ll note that many of them have market caps of $1 billion or less. If these companies can’t resist the temptation to get shifty with financial reporting in order to meet (or not) the short-term focus of Wall Street, it’s difficult to reason that even smaller public companies won’t succumb to it.

To 404(b), or Not to 404(b)? [CFO]

3 thoughts on “Grant Thornton Cuts Ties With Pornhub After Everyone Realizes Pornhub Is Full of Abuse and Illegal Porn”

  2. There is little doubt we will see Chipman69 here a lot more now that his distractions have been limited by 70%.

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