The troubles of the gypsies of the business world
I'm not retired from Big Four life, plus I can legitimately claim to be a little bit too busy to play "auditor of the auditors", so I stick to writing about what I know, and what seems to interest my readers - judging from the comments and e-mails I get, the focus has lately been on
- How to get yourself hired into Big Four life
- Do you really want to embrace this sort of life.
You will, of course, be considered, for various reasons, a gypsy of the business world if you join us.
My writing has been slow lately thanks to my early busy season, and an exceptionally busy period of "real life" which conspires to keep my offline for a healthy amount of time. It'll resume, as it always does.
Until then, a quick observation regarding the random threats to the Big Four coming out of left field.
I have only the tiniest of views of how things work, so I couldn't possibly know of all the shenanigans that could spell impending doom for any of the big firms. Get a bunch of accounting students working for them together, though, and ply them with beer and you might get many stories though. Of course this is still all a small given point of view which may or may not grasp the big picture.
Then you have the serious descriptions of wrongoing in publications like Checkmark, where you can read reports on the gross violations by individual CAs.
The juiciest reading though, the reports on public accounting firms, are kept secret.
The reasoning is ostensibly to encourage the CA firms to be more open to the outside inspectors - there are some massive confidentiality issues at stake - but it doesn't take a cynic to figure, "avoiding the stern gaze of Dennis and Francine and all which that leads to" is probably right up on that list too.
Does extreme secrecy really help anyone, though? You would think that learning from these reports would be better than studying the findings of lawsuits in school instead, where you learn about everything once the auditors have succeeded in getting everything done in the "completely wrong" format.
Better firms, fortunately, at least reveal sufficient details internally to remind people what they're doing wrong, and what could be improved.
It'd definitely be eye opening to see the magnitude and incidence of "things being done wrong" and "things which could be improved" throughout the different firms, though.
And a massive pipe dream that will not come about unless some brave or foolhardy politician decides that revising "legislation concerning oversight of accountants" is going to somehow be as sexy a topic as nuclear reactor maintenance.