Professor Elam

Wed March 12,. 2014

Page B9 of today's WSJ features excerpts from an interview with Mark Weinberger Ernst Young CEO. Mark arrived in the CEO spot after heading the tax group for four years. 

Interestingly EY is now headquartered in London, another sign of globalization. EY just paid a $99 M fine to settle claims it turned a blind eye to the problems at Lehman before that collapse in 2008.  An exec at Dewey and Leboeuf, a former law firm, described EY as 'a clueless auditor' EY claims the firm cooked the books and lied, the lawyers deny wrong doing. 

After that, amazingly at least in my opinion, Pope Francis has hired EY to help increase efficiency and transparency at the Vatican. I wonder if Lehman and the law firm figured in that decision?

As we have seen in our study of ethics in ACCT 5308.,there is no end to these kinds of failures. If indeed EY is the expert it claims to be, why did it not catch the lies at the law firm at the time, isn't taht what an audit is all about?

And so the Big Four continue paying multi million dollar fines while scoring $25.8 Billion in annual revenue. And bingo, they are growing their consulting business saying they follow SARBOX very closely. I am guessing the consulting business gows better outside the purview of SARBOX which is why EY is in London and not New York. Employment is up from 167,000 to 175,000.