kaypmger

I think a major reason is the pervasiveness of the Enron fraud. That scandal single handily destroyed the company and ruined the stock. People lost billions of dollars within the company (both investors and employees). Further, Anderson was involved in other scandals around that time (see Healthsouth) and I think the culture of the firm as a whole was shady.

The Halliburton scandal on the other hand was fraudulent, but not as pervasive and the company has been able to continue after it. Further it does not reflect KPMG as a whole (a company that globally has roughly 200 thousand employees).

Sadly every single national accounting firm has had scandals. Not more than a year ago PWC, another big 4 was forced to pay 25 million dollars in fines and suspended from all consulting practices in New York for 2 years. EY completely neglected and signed off on a virtually non existent control environment for Lehman Brothers.

Needless to say something should change to provide better services.

Auditor from KPMG, so maybe a little biased, but they are not issuing financial statements. In no place in their job are they to issue or do any actual accounting work for the company. Instead, they are supposed to issue an opinion that they have gained adequate evidence that financial statements are free from material misstatements. Now you can argue that they still haven't done that. However a job the size of Haliburton probably had close to 100,000 hours in it and 16 million is reasonable for job that size.

What's your opinion on mandatory audit firm rotation? Do you think that would clear up frauds like this and in the long run provide better services?

In your opinion how responsible were the external auditors in letting this go on? Was there just no professional skepticism at all from managers and above... or was it something potentially that could not be caught through regular testing?

As an auditor for KPMG it was not one of the firm's finest moments.

I even know some of the bankers that were utilizing these practices, had reported them, and seen them rewarded and applauded for their practices, instead of reprimanded

Can you give an example of this? Were they rewarded and applauded directly after you reported them? How were they rewarded and applauded? Was it their direct boss doing this, or someone higher up? What did they say to you after you reported them? Was that not a red flag to go to someone higher or call the employee whistleblower hotline?

Sorry for all the questions, but hearing that is very alarming.