Policing the police - Economics and Accounting should mix more than they actually do in the US
There's a relatively new site commenting on accounting for accountants, students and the like, The Accounting Onion.
It took me a moment to realize there's no relation to The Onion, America's Finest News Source, but it looks just as interesting, and perhaps more useful to CAs, CPAs, and allied folk.
The same lack of time that has caused my postings to nosedive will keep me from going through all the entries there, but this one caught my eye - it's about PCAOB inspections.
Basically, all audit firms in the US are subject to inspection, but it's the big 4 that take care of 99% of the revenue being churned through the US economy. So spending more than 1% of your time auditing companies that represent 1% of US corporate revenue - to simply things - is, according to Tom Selling, a misallocation of resources.
It would, of course, make more sense to more efficiently focus on areas where you're going to have the biggest hurt - larger companies.
Then again, if a large company interacts with small and medium sized firms, isn't it possible that the smaller entity can just as easily have instances of fraud, which somehow affect the larger firm, which it may be supplying?
Yet another one of many questions that bears more thought. I could write at length about it, but if this at all interests you I've said enough already to make you think.