REVENGE OF THE BEAN COUNTERS

摘要

There's a joke in the accounting trade that the difference between a wobbly grocery cart and a corporate auditor is that the cart has a mind of its own. Very funny, unless you had invested in MCI (formerly WorldCom), which recently announced that the pretax income it reported for 2000 and 2001 was just a tad off-$74.4 billion less than it had said, after writedowns and adjustments. Outside auditors have signed off on bogus earnings reports and balance sheets at companies from Rite Aid to Xerox. In some cases, auditors dealt with corporate brass intent on concealing thievery; WorldCom's ex-CFO, Scott Sullivan, recently pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges, for instance. In other cases, auditors simply lacked spine: again and again, they failed to police the books aggressively for fear of losing the client, along with consulting gigs that brought in higher profits than standard audit work.