Good morning, capital markets servants. Another week is upon us, let’s do this.
The city of St. Louis wants to keep IPA Top 100 #73 Anders CPAs + Advisors downtown so they’re throwing “economic incentives” the firm’s way:
The legislation, sponsored by Ward 8 Alderwoman Cara Spencer and Ward 14 Alderman Rasheen Aldridge, would establish a mechanism for the city to reimburse 85% of Anders’ payroll, earnings and net profit taxes from new hires at the firm. The full Board of Aldermen plans to consider final passage of the bill this week.
“We’re seeing a lot of business interests and businesses leaving our downtown,” Spencer said while presenting the legislation to the board’s Housing, Urban Development and Zoning Committee. “I’m excited that Anders wants to double down and make an investment in downtown.”
The firm is supposed to double their workforce in the next decade.
An AI chatbot startup is in trouble. The accusations are egregiously stupid, like faking an audit report from PwC. Come on, everyone knows if you’re going to fake an audit report you use Grant Thornton.
New details are emerging in the shocking accusations engulfing GameOn chatbot platform founder Alexander Charles Beckman and his wife, Valerie Lau.
The Securities and Exchange Commission alleged the duo faked an audit report with the logo and signature of Big 4 accounting firm PwC that it sent to investors along with phony financials claiming millions in revenue from supposed customers like the NBA, NHL, PGA and Coca-Cola. The reality, authorities said, is that PwC never audited GameOn, and those other organizations either never worked with GameOn—or the contracts involved the chatbot platform paying them to use their branded content in some cases.
The couple is accused of defrauding investors out of more than $60 million.
KPMGers in Santa Clara, California are starting off the new year in a new 52,000 sq ft office:
Big Four accounting firm KPMG moved its Silicon Valley office after 13 years in a Santa Clara building.
Though the new space is slightly smaller and less than a mile from the former office, it gives employees the No. 1 thing on their workplace wishlist — walkable amenities.
“This particular location checked all the boxes,” said Ron Lopes, KPMG’s Silicon Valley office managing partner.
The space is 12% smaller than KPMG’s last office but there are more desks, wrote Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Deloitte, EY, and KPMG are doing some work for Bangladesh:
Bangladesh’s central bank has hired Big Four accountancy firms EY, Deloitte and KPMG to conduct an “asset quality review” of banks it claims lost $17bn to businesspeople close to the regime of former leader Sheikh Hasina, bank governor Ahsan Mansur has said.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mansur said the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit had also formed 11 joint investigation teams to track down and reclaim assets it believes were bought with the funds siphoned out of the banks and to help to prosecute those responsible.
Corruption is so bad in Bangladesh it has its own Wikipedia page.
Business Insider publishes an “I hated Big 4, left, and now I’m happy!” essay for the 11 millionth time:
I got a job at Deloitte but was miserable and quit at 24. Now I’m doing what I love and will never go back.
I started working at Deloitte full-time in the fall of 2008 after graduating. My job required extremely long hours in what was known as the 3-4-5 program — three nights in a hotel, four days at a client site, and a fifth day back in the office. I flew to a client site every Monday, stayed through Wednesday night, and flew back to Boston on Thursday. It wasn’t a good work-life balance.
It was a hustle, churn-and-burn culture, and it was exhausting. I hated it, but was too shy to raise my concerns.
She put in notice in 2010 and set out to start a photography business. This made me LOL:
I don’t ever miss working in consulting and wouldn’t consider returning to that fast-paced life, although I’m not sure if the culture has changed.
For the worse maybe?
EY talks about blood on the blockchain:
About 1 in 10 people entering hospitals every day need some kind of blood transfusion – they are a fundamental cornerstone of medicine. Transfusions are needed to replace the blood of those suffering from cancer or other blood diseases and replenish blood lost in serious accidents and medical procedures like childbirth or surgery.
This demand adds up. It’s estimated that, in the US alone, about 32,000 pints (18,184 litres) of blood products (red cells, platelets or plasma) are transfused every day, so keeping a reliable and steady supply of blood is critical. About 4.5 million Americans would die every year without a transfusion.
Donated blood makes its way to patients via complex blood supply chain networks. Especially in a large country, each unit of blood can travel thousands of miles. Units are also broken down into smaller, similarly vital medical products, such as, plasma, platelets and red blood cells.
Knowing where products are, and what condition they are in, is essential to running any supply chain, from minerals to food to consumer products. But with blood, this accountability is even more important – after all, what’s at stake is not the continuing business of impatient customers, but people’s lives. For that reason, the tracking of blood products is highly regulated.
And potentially $$ for the firm that can figure out how to bill for it, eh? Eh!
EY Canada has been working with Canadian Blood Services (CBS) to address this challenge with a proposal to put blood records on the blockchain. The thinking was simple: if this was done effectively, we could provide near real-time visibility and traceability of blood products throughout the system.
Speaking of Canada, did you wake up this morning and ask yourself “how much money did the Canadian government spend on Big 4 contracts last year?”
$240 million CAD, according to a deep dive by The Hill Times. $136.4 million of that was Deloitte’s, KPMG came in at $75.9 million, EY at $21 million, and PwC a mere $6.1 million.
Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) Yves Giroux told The Hill Times in a Jan. 17 interview that last year’s spending on contracts with the Big Four seems “a bit high” given the government’s commitments to reducing its reliance on external contractors.
Yves also said it’s “bizarre” that the government keeps awarding repeated contracts to the same firms year after year. “Then it suggests that the government would probably be better off hiring that expertise if it’s going to be needed for an extended period of time, rather than contract it out,” he said.
Closer to home, the DOD OIG evaluated outside auditors:
The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General, or DOD OIG, has issued a report that evaluated the compliance of non-federal auditors with government auditing standards when they conducted audits of DOD contractors’ incurred costs.
DOD OIG said Thursday it evaluated 16 incurred cost audits between October 2018 and September 2022 and found noncompliance with government auditing standards for 69 percent of such audits.
The office identified 34 instances of noncompliance among the 11 audits, including failure to obtain sufficient evidence to support their reported compliance for eight audits and inability to use a sufficient sample methodology to back conclusions for four audits.
Grant Thornton’s national MP of technology and audit partner Andrea Schulz has something to say to CFO Dive about retaining talent:
As technology CFOs grapple with numerous challenges, including rising costs and the impact of artificial intelligence, holding on to top talent is moving to the top of their priority list. Generative AI is still in the spotlight, putting a premium on talent with the necessary skills to utilize such tools effectively. At the same time, inflation, a glut of technology layoffs, and other factors have both narrowed compensation growth and boosted attrition in the tech sector.
Creating “cultural stickiness” is emerging as a key way for finance chiefs to retain the talent they need, said Andrea Schulz, partner, audit services for Grant Thornton LLP and national managing principal of technology at Grant Thornton Advisors. In a recent survey of technology CFOs by Grant Thornton, 58% said “maintaining or improving organizational culture” was a top priority when it comes to human capital during the next 12 months.
“You don’t want that attrition with your top talent, and so we have a refresh of, ‘we can’t solve this churn issue with just writing checks to people and increasing salaries,’” she said. “It’s really going to need to come from, ‘what are we differentiating ourselves through?’”
Can you feel my eyes rolling into the back of my head from wherever you are?
This looks like a good place to wrap up. Email or text if you have anything of note to share (anything of note being a story, an article you read somewhere, a tip, or a shower thought) and have a great week, you.
