COMPANY AUDITORS
IGNORE HUMAN CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR NEGLIGENCE
There is plenty
of evidence to show that company auditors are asleep on the job,
usually in bed with management as shown by Enron, WorldCom, Barings,
BCCI, Maxwell, Wickes, Polly Peck, Xerox, Wiggins and many other
episodes.
Auditors try to cover
up their failures with glib statements and no regard for the social and
human consequences.
You often hear auditors say things are "materially correct
or compliant" (and that is only after they have excluded all
the increasing number of things they assert to be outside their
remit/responsibility, so can ignore).
Lets be (very) generous to them and pretend
they mean their 'opinion' is a "99.9%" opinion" (sadly the number
of frauds, other scandals, financial restatements, makes that
pretence somewhat ambitious). Nevertheless, if that is what is you are willing to accept that standard of
care, think about what that might imply for a country, such as
the US.
* 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.
* 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped/year.
* 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled/hour.
* 2,000,000 documents will be lost by the US IRS this year.
* 2.5 million books will be shipped with the wrong covers.
* Two planes landed at Chicago's O'Hare airport will be unsafe every day.
* 315 entries in Webster's Dictionary will be misspelled.
* 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written this year.
* 880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information
on their magnetic strips.
* 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly during the year.
* 5.5 million cases of soft drinks produced will be flat.
* 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly.
* 3056 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections
* A typical day would be 24 hours long (give or take 86.4 seconds).