Behind every spectacular corporate meltdown, there's an auditing firm sweating bullets.
Little surprise, then, that when the entire financial sector melts down, all four of the Big 4 auditing firms start to sweat. Each one has (or had) at least several clients in the financial sector that have recently been forced into acquisition, government oversight, or bankruptcy. That means greater litigation risk—as you can see from
this story in Compliance Week, the sub-prime lawsuits have barely begun—and the probable loss of a client engagement. That can’t be fun. For our amusement here, however, I’ve compiled a short list of recent financial failures and who the auditing firms were:
- AIG: PricewaterhouseCoopers
- Bear Stearns: Deloitte
- Countrywide Financial: KPMG
- Fannie Mae: Deloitte
- Freddie Mac: PricewaterhouseCoopers
- HBOS (Bank of Scotland): KPMG
- IndyMac Bancorp: Ernst & Young
- Lehman Brothers: Ernst & Young
- Merrill Lynch: Deloitte
- Wachovia: KPMG
- Washington Mutual: Deloitte
That’s four failures for Deloitte, three for KPMG, and two each for Ernst & Young and PwC. Deloitte looks particularly bad here, since it has the distinction of auditing the largest bank to fail so far (WaMu), the investment bank that started this panic (Bear Stearns) and one of the two largest banking companies in the whole mess (Fannie Mae).
Deloitte confirmed in August that it was laying off 900 people, about 2 percent of its total staff. Over at the ever-popular blog
Re:The Auditors, rumors are running rampant of
a much larger wave of layoffs coming sometime soon.
Stay tuned, folks. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was supposed to start an era of lifetime employment at the Big 4; the credit crisis seems to have ended it.