Auditors next to face fallout from the crash

To be fair, it was not an item to set the financial news pages alight. Few noticed when, two months ago, the all-powerful Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wall Street forced General Electric, the world's biggest company, to restate two years' worth of accounts.

Accused by the SEC of four separate accounting violations, GE, while not admitting guilt, paid out US$50 million ($67 million) to settle the case last August.

During the investigation, it appeared one of GE's "issues" was its apparent need to avoid a US$200 million hit to its profits caused by a hedging position that went wrong.

The SEC filing claimed that KPMG, GE's auditors, "rejected" accountancy measures to avoid the hit. But after several redrafts, KPMG approved the numbers and GE's hedges were reduced to manageable proportions. While GE endured the regulator's attention, KPMG is silent when asked why it has so far seemingly escaped scrutiny.

For KPMG, read the entire global auditing industry. As bankers take a kicking from an increasingly irate public, auditors have avoided the anger, even though they signed off trillion-dollar balance sheets, sanctioned increased dividends in bank shares that collapsed months later, blithely assumed markets would function seamlessly and established controversial rules that inflated bubbles and amplified losses.

It is why one fund manager dubbed the profession an army of Morlocks - the fictional troglodyte characters from H.G. Wells' Time Machine who spend their lives underground, away from the light.

The fact that auditors have not been brought to book for their role in the crisis is causing frustration and alarm to a growing number of politicians, regulators, fund managers and academics.

But the G20, and in particular the European Commission, are beginning to ask questions about apparent conflicts of interest and the seeming cosy self-regulatory structures that govern what is a pivotal financial function: an investor's first line of defence in assessing the viability of the world's biggest and most important companies.

The commission is warning the bean counters' most powerful global organisation, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), that it has just one month to redraw key accountancy laws on how to value assets.

Failure to do so in time will make it impossible for the world's biggest companies to state their 2009 accounts.

There is, says the commission, a risk of the London-based IASB, dominated by former KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers staff, being stripped of its power as a global rule-setter. In a number of European states this would be seen as a victory over a disliked British institution.

It comes as we learn that one European government has launched a scoping exercise to establish whether it is possible to sue the profession in one hit. Any such action, it is believed, would be on the basis that accountants took the lead in regulating themselves, setting international standards while also advising audit clients, and so are partly responsible for the financial mess.

While experts believe it will be at least another year before the trickle of legal actions launched so far becomes a flood, there have been developments.

Last week KPMG was named in a civil lawsuit for its role as auditor for Bernard Madoff, who perpetrated the world's biggest financial fraud. It has issued no comment.

And all eyes are on the first case due to come before courts in America, where KPMG is being sued for US$1 billion in damages by the trustee of a collapsed US sub-prime lender, New Century Financial. KPMG is accused of conducting "reckless and grossly negligent audits" that failed to show the lender's financial problems. The auditing firm has denied any wrongdoing.

It is hardly surprising that KPMG's name crops up so regularly. A trawl through the list of failed banks reveals the same audit names over and over again, because multinational auditing is the near-exclusive preserve of four firms - PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Ernst & Young and Deloitte & Touche.

The roll call of shamed institutions links PricewaterhouseCoopers to Northern Rock, Landsbanki, Carlyle Capital Corporation and Glitnir.

Deloitte & Touche signed off Alliance & Leicester, RBS and Bear Stearns. KPMG did the numbers for HBOS, Kaupthing, and Bradford & Bingley, while Ernst & Young had the big one: Lehman Brothers.

"The cosy cabal which cocoons management and auditors has failed us," says Emile Woolf, an internationally respected forensic accountant who acts as a consultant for accountancy firm Kingston Smith.

"Take HBOS: the 'independent' experts selected by the bank to review its risk manager's allegations concerning its insane business model just happened to be the bank's own auditors, who concluded, after vetting compliance [but not strategy], that there were no serious failings in corporate governance.

"Their fees ... are reported to have exceeded £100 million in the past eight years."

"Auditors have got away with murder," suggests one senior fund manager. "Why did they allow banks to pay out dividends that months later crashed?"

There is no one answer to that question. Some suggest the evolution of mark-to-market accounting - valuing assets in line with what the going rate is rather than what they originally cost or whatever is the lowest price - is central to auditors failing to look behind their assumptions.

Mark-to-market was born in 1993, according to America's Brookings Institution think tank. It was a reaction, it says, to the US savings and loan bank crisis, which was exacerbated by assets valued at what they originally cost rather than current value.

The subsequent remedy swung completely the other way at a time when the world was entering a 15-year growth cycle.

The result, suggest some analysts, was that mark-to-market exaggerated the boom because it allowed banks and private equity to borrow on assets whose value was seen to be continually rising.

But others are less sure. The SEC in December pointed out that 31 per cent of bank assets were reported using the fair value measure, rather than mark-to-market, as of first-quarter 2008.

"Banks generally carried investment securities, trading assets, and derivatives at fair value."

For decades, auditors have enjoyed self-regulation. This has led to senior accountants, mainly from PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG, assuming rule-making status. Many argue that this apparent conflict of interest has led to auditors skilfully deflecting blame for failing to spot glaring black holes or fraud at a range of institutions from Enron to Madoff and the failed banks.

UK forensic accountant Richard Murphy says: "The fundamental question is how accountants got away with changing rules of accountancy, which state they don't have to assess the valuation of assets underlying the assets on a balance sheet. How did they get away with changing the audit rules?"

A source at the IASB, which is responsible for setting accountancy rules in virtually every country except the US says: "There are lessons to be learned. There are enhancements we need to make. The question is about the root causes [of the financial crisis] and they are pretty clear. Bad lending decisions, poor risk management, rating agencies, lack of investor oversight. I would suggest auditing and accounting is low on the list."

Woolf says the profession has been fudging the independence issue for decades. "If that is not sorted soon, someone else will have to do the work - but properly."

In his book on the Equity Funding Corporation fraud - the Enron of the 1970s - Raymond Dirks wrote: "If routine auditing procedures cannot detect 64,000 phony insurance policies, $25 million in counterfeit bonds and $100 million in missing assets, what is the purpose of audits?"

More than 30 years later, investors are asking themselves the same questions.

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