#auditors

[jangillman]

You can't make this 💩 up?!!

[pratchettquotes]

Hour after hour, it went on, with a patience that at first terrified and then bored. It was the warfare of clerks, and it harried the enemy through many columns and files. Moist could read words that weren't there, but the clerks found the numbers that weren't there, or were there twice, or were there but going the wrong way. They didn't hurry. Peel away the lies, and the truth would emerge, naked and ashamed and with nowhere else to hide.

Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

[goldengirlssaywhat]

📺 The Golden Girls

[frankjc3rd]

What will happen when ...

I have been following first amendment auditors on YouTube and every encounter when the police show up sometimes they try and justify their presence by saying there could be nefarious plans to recording the outside of a building.

The man that attacked Bourbon Street did so using Meta glasses that you could not tell were recording unless you looked. He kept his plans to himself and did not in fact draw attention to anything by standing on a street corner holding a camera.

He was not suspicious in any way.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

KPMG audits the nursing homes it advises on how to beat audits

Tomorrow (May 10), I’m in VANCOUVER for a keynote at the Open Source Summit and a book event for Red Team Blues at Heritage Hall and on Thurs (May 11), I’m in CALGARY for Wordfest.

Auditors are capitalism’s lubricants, who keep the gears of finance capital smoothly a-whirl, allowing investors to move their money in and out of companies without having to go pore over their books and walk through their facilities. Without auditors, the gears of capitalism would grind themselves to dust:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/18/ink-stained-wretches/#countless

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/09/dingo-babysitter/#maybe-the-dingos-ate-your-nan

Unfortunately for capitalism, auditing is irredeemably broken. The Big Four auditors (PWC, EY, Deloitte and KPMG) have merged to monopoly, becoming “too big to fail” and “too big to jail.” These four gigantic firms have spun up fantastically lucrative “consulting” divisions that advise companies on how to cheat on their audits and attain incredible (paper) gains. The work of these “consultants” is worth far more than the accounting and auditing jobs the companies do, and the weaker the audits are, the more profitable the consulting is:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#crooked-ref

This crisis has been a long time brewing. Back in 2001, the accounting/consulting giant Arthur Andersen was at the center of Enron’s fraud, which lit $11B in shareholder capital on fire. Enron had been making everyday people angry for years, engineering rolling blackouts and incredible energy-price gouging, but no one cares about working peoples’ complaints. By contrast, stealing $11B from rich people was something the authorities couldn’t ignore. They gave Andersen the death penalty, trying to teach the surviving accounting firms a lesson about what happens when you fuck with plutes.

But those other firms learned the wrong lesson: the collapse of Andersen was so disruptive that it soon became clear that the authorities would never take another giant consulting firm down, no matter how egregious its conduct was. They doubled down on crime, and then doubled down again.

It’s hard to pick a winner in the Big Four Accounting Firm Corruption Olympics, but KPMG is a strong contender, with a long history of just being monumentally inept and wrong. Back when Enron was unspooling, KPMG devoted itself to threatening people who linked to its website “without a license to do so”:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020207141547/http://chris.raettig.org/email/jnl00040.html

A couple years later, they declared war on wifi, trying to convince normies that wireless networks were an existential risk to human civilization:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2885339.stm

But there’s not much money in wifi scare stories or licenses to link. KPMG are good dialectical materialists, devoted to money over ideology, and boy did they figure out some wild ways to make money. For one thing, they figured out that they could get more accountants certified by cheating…on ethics exams:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-kpmg-cheating-scandal-was-much-more-widespread-than-originally-thought-2019-06-18

KPMG’s top managers bribed regulators to give them the answer-sheets for ethics exams. What did they bribe those public employees with? Jobs at KPMG:

https://www.pogo.org/investigation/2020/01/how-accountants-took-washingtons-revolving-door-to-a-criminal-extreme

There’s hardly a month that goes by without another KPMG scandal somewhere in the world, with enormous monetary and social fallout. During the lockdowns, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government outsourced the creation and maintenance of ArriveCAN (a contact tracing app for people who entered Canada) to a grifter called GC Strategies, who billed millions for their services. GC Strategies didn’t do any work — instead, they paid KPMG $1,000-$1,500 day to hire freelancers to build the app. The app itself was a catastrophic failure, and that failure didn’t just embarrass the government — it also failed to protect Canadians during a once-in-a-century global pandemic. KPMG raked off a 30% commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/31/mckinsey-and-canada/#comment-dit-beltway-bandits-en-canadien

In the USA, KPMG helped Microsoft work up a radioactively illegal tax-evasion scheme. Microsoft poured the millions it saved by cheating on its taxes into dark-money operations that lobbied to defund the IRS so that KPMG and Microsoft could cook up even more illegal tax-evasion schemes:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher

But KPMG doesn’t content itself with screwing over everyday people and rotting our democratic institutions — it also engages in the dangerous business of helping billionaires steal from millionaires. KPMG was the auditor that signed off on the scam “oil company” Miller Energy Partners, a fraud that operated for years thanks to KPMG’s rubber-stamp on its crooked books:

https://www.desmog.com/2021/06/03/miller-energy-kpmg-auditors-oil-fraud/

The company was run by serial fraudsters with long rapsheets for stealing millions. They staffed their C-suite with executives from disgraced companies that had been busted for running Ponzi schemes, issuing press releases praising those execs’ “proven track records in raising capital.” KPMG ignored every red flag, ignored the hundreds of millions in fraud on the books — and when the whole thing came crashing down, the responsible KPMG partner kept his job for years, until retiring with a full and fat pension.

More recently, KPMG made millions by confidently certifying the stability of a large regional bank, assuring investors and depositors that it was managing its risk and could be trusted. The name of the client that KPMG was so bullish on will be familiar to you: Silicon Valley Bank:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kpmg-faces-scrutiny-for-audits-of-svb-and-signature-bank-42dc49dd

KPMG epitomizes the idea of Too Big To Fail and Too Big to Jail. Despite being at the center of virtually every major finance scandal, it continues to thrive and grow. Remember the Carillion bust, in which billions went up in smoke and swathes of privatized government services vanished overnight? Not only did KPMG sign off on fraudulent Carillion books, but it escaped fines for doing so — and got paid to help administer Carillion’s bankruptcy:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/uk-watchdog-fines-kpmg-24-mln-over-carillion-regenersis-audits-2022-07-25/

Despite this, KPMG continues to find willing buyers for its services. After all, when the sector is dominated by four giant, lavishly corrupt firms, there’s not much choice in the matter:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle

This is bad news for the investor class, of course, but it’s even worse news for the people who rely on the services that KPMG certifies, even as it helps grifters destroy them. Every kind of business relies on audits, from transit to aviation to day-care to eldercare.

Here’s a scary one for you: in Australia, the job of auditing residential eldercare homes’ compliance with safety and anti-abuse rules has been outsourced to KPMG. While KPMG earns a mid-sized fortune from these audits, it earns far more advising the owners of residential aged care homes on how to beat those audits:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/04/firm-performing-australian-aged-care-audit-also-charging-providers-for-expertise

KPMG says that the division that ensures the safety and dignity of elderly people is firewalled off from the division that advises companies on how to spend as little as possible on that safety and dignity — but KPMG also went to great lengths to keep the fact that it was selling services to both sides a secret.

Once the secret got out, an anonymous KPMG spokesmonster said, “When considering a request to perform an audit, we undertake a detailed process to ensure the engagement is free of conflicts.”

It’s hypothetically possible that this is true, but anyone who believes anything KPMG says is a sucker. The company’s rap-sheet goes back decades. This is, after all, a company that cheated on its ethics exams.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: Two business-suited male figures seen side on; each has a bomb for a head, and each is holding a lit lighter that has ignited the other's fuse. Each bomb is wearing a green accountant's eyeshade. In the background is a fiery mushroom cloud. They wear KPMG logos on their lapels.]

Image:

Vectorportal.com (modified) https://vectorportal.com/vector/business-deal-illustration/23215

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Inspired by an illustration by Matt Kenyon for the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/07184d86-81cf-11e2-b050-00144feabdc0

[webglazeblog]

Why Companies Hire External Auditors in Dubai

If you are wondering why companies hire external auditors in Dubai then here we mention a complete guide that will help you to know about external auditors.

[buzzdixonwriter]

Toxic Individuality

One of the great flaws of American (and by extension, Western European) culture is that our desire and provisions for individual liberty and civil rights also opens a door for abusive behavior by narcissistic and / or sociopathic bordering psychotic individuals raging against society at large.

We’re not talking about individuals or groups with focused protests and proposed solutions against specific injustice or society failings, we’re not discussing those availing themselves of transparency laws to familiarize themselves with the actions of local authorities so as to make better choices when voting.

No, we’re referring to that class of free range imbeciles that include the sovereign citizen (SovCit) and so-called “first amendment auditor” types.*

Typical of the SovCit / first amendment auditor class: They create a hierarchy in their minds that all others should be compelled to obey and are amazed and dismayed (dismazed?) when nobody takes them seriously.  Totally self-involved, they create their own interpretations of civil and criminal law which fly in the face of not merely clearly enunciated and legally verified laws and ordnances but also literally thousands of years of historical legal precedent.

Numerous first amendment auditor videos show them insisting they have authority over the police because they “pay their salaries” and can thus order them around. I’ve heard numerous sovereign citizens tell judges that courts have no authority over them because the SovCit has declared the court to be invalid and without authority (Spoiler: The judge almost always demonstrates their authority by having the bailiff jail the SovCit for contempt of court).

There’s a Venn diagram where the two movements overlap with one another and libertarianism.  Not all libertarians are malicious loony toons, of course, but that current certainly runs through their movement, fueled and reinforced by the rantings of Ayn Rand.    

Real hard core libertarians remove themselves from society and go off into the wilderness to live as they wish. Genuine auditors aren’t annoying people at work, disrupting service for others, or snooping on legally protected private information. 

What these YouTube clowns are doing is making it more difficult for legitimate problems to be dealt with because they’re choking the system with their antics, making it easier for real issues to be ignored. 

The first amendment auditors I’ve seen invade public spaces with cameras, despite posted notices not to record. They’re fond of zooming in on posters saying they have the right to record (which is technically true) but overlook the fact the posters also say the law forbids recordings for commercial reasons (such as to make money on YouTube; I’ve yet to see a first amendment auditor who did beg for money more shamelessly that PornHub streamer operating out of Russia), and that SCOTUS also ruled anyone in authority at a public building may issue a ban on recording without permission. 

(I mean, it’s literally right there on the poster they zoom in on when claiming their “rights” but they never read past the first part of the paragraph.)

Many of them gleefully record themselves barging into social service offices, medical offices, family law offices, etc. where there are laws banning the recording of minors and patients or copying personal data that might be on computer screens or paperwork that employees are going over.  

One so-called auditor raised his camera to record through a window above eye level outside a bank, capturing data of a customer’s account on a computer a teller was using. 

That’s an invasion of privacy, not an exercise of first amendment rights. 

Several auditors have been arrested filming around prisons because there are very specific laws banning unauthorized recording around jails and prisons because of the threat of jail breaks or targeting of prison employees.  To go to a prison with the intent of recording without permission is different from seeing a crime being committed and then taking out your phone to record it as evidence to hand over to the police. 

They do this because they are pathetic little people who lack any real agency in their lives and think they are proving something by intruding on the lives of others with impunity. 

They got away with a lot of stuff during the pandemic when for health concerns courts were reluctant to jail people for minor offenses; it’ll be interesting to see what happens to them after the pandemic is declared over. Metaphorically they’re like annoying little puppies who think they can’t be stuffed in a pillowcase and tossed in the river. 

And to stress the point yet again: There is a world of difference between these confrontational assholes and legit journalists, or even upstanding citizens like Darnella Frazier (who recorded the killing of George Floyd).  Frazier stayed far enough back not to be charged with interfering with the police; too many so-called auditors do interfere with active police investigations (one taped himself being arrested when he insisted on entering an area where police were actively searching for an armed suspect).

The police have an enormous amount of leeway in investigating complaints, and even if the complaint does not rise to the level of a crime, they’re required to conduct an investigation at least to the level of finding out what the problem is and what needs to be done about it. This includes identifying who the various parties are.  I may not have committed an actual crime but if the police stop me for an incident in which someone has accused me of committing a crime I can’t tell them to go away and leave me alone even if a cursory investigation will prove I did nothing wrong. 

Common sense tells you we need this sort of authority in the hands of police because otherwise no murderer or rapist could ever be arrested. “I didn’t do anything wrong.  Go away.” 

The SovCit / auditor / extreme libertarian overlap is not based on any coherent legal or political doctrine. Rather, it’s a form of mental dysfunction where the person suffers from a delusion that their rights are the only rights that matter, that there is no authority over them, and that they may behave as they wish and others must cater to their whims. 

  © Buzz Dixon

  *  I’d include Qarens of all genders because they certainly behave out of a sense of narcissistic entitlement, but most Qarens are genuine amateurs, acting like anusoids for the sheer love of the game, not wannabe professionals like first amendment auditors; however, Qarens have been known to go full SovCit when insisting on representing themselves in court, typically receiving justice in a spectacularly hilarious manner.

[albino-bat]

Three gray figures floated just above it. Exactly what they were can't be described in normal language. Some people might call them cherubs, although there was nothing rosy-cheeked about them. They might be rumored among those who see to it that gravity operates and that time stays separate from space. Call them auditors. Auditors of reality.  ~Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man