September 17, 2009
TOdd on Audits V: why oh why?
Editor's note: TOdd wrote this long comment to Audits V and I thought it had to be a post:
Regarding the failure of financial auditing, or statutory audits, there is probably a body of knowledge to be found in academia and business journals. There is certainly a lot of wisdom and knowledge among the accounting profession, although it is heavily suppressed, and auditors, like bankers, start out opaque and unself-aware. All three of these things grow deeper over lifelong habit (lack of honest self appraisal, lack of communication skills to talk about their business in anything but literal terms, and lack of any motive or impulse to be honest or candid even if they wanted to.) So, you'll find the best research on this problem in the business schools and press, for whom auditors are a business problem to be understood, and in the accountancy schools who still harbor a lot of great minds, with too much integrity to survive in the global audit firms. The audit profession took root in the 1930s and I would have to guess that it was captured from day one, by the publicly listed companies they were supposed to be auditing.
Accountants have had the choice to improve themselves at several historic points in time; the 1929 crash, the end of WW2, when every other economy was demolished, and the end of the Soviet threat. What they've actually done was continue fiddling with their false definitions of economic substance, called GAAP, which is really intended to modulate the lies and maintain as much opaqueness as the public would tolerate.
The greatest opportunity to improve business reporting, if that were the intention, has come from improvements in database, computing, and the internet. Internally of course, companies have built information tools to navigate and understand their customers, suppliers, financial structures and inner working. All of it conceived, developed and maintained for the benefit of senior executives. The host-centric, server-centric architecture of the dominant computing architectures (ibm, att, dec, sun, microsoft etc) reflect this.
There is nothing that reveals the intent and will of the AICPA more clearly than its design choices in XBRL. And I doubt if anybody will ever write the book about XBRL, since the people who realized what a betrayal it was, while it was being cooked up, were physically nauseated and left the standards bodies, myself included. Outside the meeting room and convention halls, there were more than a few people who saw what was happening-- and why would they pay annual dues of $thousands, plus travel costs, to attend the next XBRL conference, unless they were part of the corrupt agenda themselves?
I am reminded of the State of Washington democratic party convention I attended a few years ago-- more than 2/3s of the 1000 delegates from the precincts, statewide had never been to a convention before. And, by the end of the convention, a percentage even larger than that, was in open rebellion against the selection of candidates and railroading of the platform and agenda, by top party officials. So, 2/3s of them would never bother participating in the Democratic Party in the next election cycle either.
The people responsible for the sabotage and corruption of the AICPA's XBRL and other technologies, are Barry Melancon, working on behalf of opaque interests in the audit firms and wall street, and, the young turks they hired, Charlie Hoffman and Eric Cohen. Hoffman bubbled up in the Seattle area as an evangelist for microsoft technologies in accounting firms and probably never understood where the money and support for his magic carpet ride was coming from. Microsoft itself being a front-end for IBM and wall street. There have been a few, who try from time to time, to make these technologies honest, such as David RR Weber, Glen Gray, Bill McCarthy...
A more hopeful technology, ebXML emerged shortly after XBRL, and again the history is so vast, somebody should write a book---indeed would write a book-- if they had the stomach for it. Now, here, we ran into a different set of entrenched interests, the EDI industry and adjacent companies and interests. It was a fabulous project, with at least ten different workgroups, each with a lot of dedicated people, supported by many great companies.
To sum it all up-- there are people who want to use the power of computers and communications to reach process improvements, labor savings, AND transparency for all stakeholders. These people have developed over many years, a very complete understanding of business processes in their industries and somewhat less completely, a generalized architecture for all economic transactions. However, there are a plutocracy who own all their companies and make all of the hiring and firing decisions. Obviously, these people at the very top, have leaned hard on the tiller, since the early days.
And the accounting and auditing profession knows where its bread is buttered, see Bob Elliot's diagram of "five stage value chain."
Iang responds in the next post.
Posted by iang at September 17, 2009 07:43 PM | TrackBack