PwC auditors fingered for Satyam fraud

Indian police have accused two PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants of colluding and conspiring with company founder Ramalinga Raju to create false accounts for Satyam. The two auditors are in police custody but have not yet been charged. "During interrogation [the auditors, Subramani Gopala Krishnan and Talluri Srinivas] …

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Posted Friday 30th January 2009 11:28 GMT

DaveOfArabia

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

So, who audits the auditors?

Posted Friday 30th January 2009 11:28 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Can we get the Indian police to...

Can we get these Indian police to investigate the competence and indeed honesty of the bancasinos and others at the centre of the so-called "credit crunch"? If Satyam couldn't have made/lost the relatively tiddling amount in his picture without both fraud (by him and others?) and conspiracy (him and the auditors?) and probably theft too, how on earth did Gordon B Ruin's mates at the bancasinos manage it without breaking any laws?

Posted Friday 30th January 2009 15:44 GMT

Anonymous Coward

@Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

The answer is... No one.

However, Anderson is no more - no one would ever trust their audits ever again after Enron. It would be interesting to see who else PWC audit - if I had shares in those companies I would be worried.

Shareholders get asked at each AGM to "approve" the re-appointment of auditors and if it were PWC I would suggest they do not - their shares could be rendered worthless rather quickly.

The main difference between Anderson/Enron and PWC/Satyam is the level of press coverage. PCW had a similar failure in Japan and seemed to survive - they need to fail on a big US / UK client for anyone to pay attention.

Posted Friday 30th January 2009 15:44 GMT

Anony mouse

it's a

Ramalinga Ding-Dong

Posted Saturday 31st January 2009 02:28 GMT

Anonymous Coward

@Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

It's not so much a case of waiting for it to happen in the UK/US, due to the way the big 4 tend to operate.

You end up with nominally independent country practices, which are legally seperate entities. If you remember back to the Parmalat fiasco, there were issues around which country practice was actually responsible for signing off on the books - the issue IIRC was that the Italian practice took on good faith the instructions that everything had been checked by their Brazilian counterparts.

How this will change when you have companies like Ernst & Young now merging across Europe remains to be seen, but I'm guessing in this case, if PWC's Indian practice was gubbed then the rest would move on, as happened in the Japanese case.

Posted Saturday 31st January 2009 02:28 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Parmalat

and Deloitte & Touche / Grant Thornton are others that got away.

Posted Tuesday 3rd February 2009 18:53 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Auditors vary enormously around the globe

I work for one of the world's largest audit firms (hence the anon post) and, while I would certainly not suggest that there are many instances of poor auditing, it is not fair to suggest that all PwC audits are defective just because of this.

Auditing a company engaged in fraud is difficult. The auditor's job is not to detect fraud (although it should certainly be aware of the possibility and act if it sees evidence). If it were, the amount of work auditors performed would be much higher.

Also, there are only rather tenuous links between different national firms and just because a few partners in India did a bad (or possibly dishonest) job does not mean that the same standards are applied in UK or US. I know from personal experience that the quality of work carried out in Europe is much higher than a lot of work performed in India or the far East.

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