No reaction but sorrow seems appropriate, for the self-inflicted gunshot death on August 13 of New York-based Deloitte partner Daniel Pirron.
Limited attention has been paid in the accountancy media (here and here). Of which, some comments are tracking his family’s suggested linkage to Deloitte’s UK client Standard Chartered Plc, and the Iran-related money-laundering scandal in which, the week before, the bank had agreed with the New York Department of Financial Services to a $ 340 million fine.
That speculation is unfortunate, for reasons only starting with Pirron’s scope of work itself, in the office of Deloitte’s general counsel, and the firm’s statement that “he was not involved in any way” with its work for Standard Chartered.
Focus here on suicides proximate to financial and corporate wrong-doing – an area of my concern long-predating my unhappily accurate prediction on December 16, 2008, that it was a "safe but unfortunate bet…that at least one remorse-driven suicide will further color the already tawdry (Madoff) tale” – coming only too true a week later with the suicide in his Madison Avenue office of Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, the founder of a fund whose investors lost millions with Bernard Madoff.
That context is difficult enough – initially because the sample size is miniscule, making attempts at meaningful generalizations intensely hazardous. The conditions are, however, readily distinguishable from the impulsive acts of the emotionally immature – fortunately most often not effective – or the reasoned acts of the gravely ill – movie director Tony Scott’s recent fatal leap being perhaps explicable by a report (since disputed) of his terminal brain cancer.
A non-comprehensive survey of scandal-related suicides starts with one point of interest – that with the exception of the recent failed attempt by Peregrine CEO Russell Wasendorf Sr, those driven to act are not the principal perpetrators.
Which should be no surprise. The necessary level of introspective regret and remorse would not be in the DNA of the typical white-collar criminal. Think of the egos both of those actually brought to book – a sample including Bernie Cornfeld, Bernie Ebbers and Bernie Madoff – and those of tattered moral fabric although escaping the formalities of prosecution – “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap and Donald Trump and Angelo Mozilo and Dick Fuld.
Instead it’s the secondary players – the lower-level executives and the gate-keepers – Frank Shuch, the least of the accused triumvirate at Connecticut’s Colonial Realty (1992); Cliff Baxter at Enron (2002); Bernie Madoff’s son Mark (2008); or the reported attempt by Satyam CFO Srinivas Vadlamani (2009).
Even so noted, extreme personal acts are not in character for those choosing careers in professional services, particularly accountancy – there being perhaps some dignifying comfort behind the tradition of ill-founded ridicule of the bean-counters’ brown shoes and green eye shades.
True enough that accountants are neither saints nor angels. As with any fallible system of human design, the firms’ best-tuned screens for personal quality will let slip the rare exceptions – those challenged by intelligence or discipline, the addict or the abuser, the venal or the pliable. And while public accounting is not a vehicle for great wealth accumulation, those shifting to entrepreneurship or the executive suite are on occasion seduced or suborned.
But in the four decades of my broad experience across the profession, only a handful have met the defined standards of the criminal mind. Practitioners of independent assurance -- first delivered to Victorian-era public companies starting in 1850 with the report by William Welch Deloitte himself on the accounts of the Great Western Railway -- have overwhelmingly been people of stability, intelligence, good faith and honorable intentions.
The best scholarship on human behavior and choice-making counsels us to resist the instinctive impulse to construct simplistic stories in a futile search to comprehend the irrational.
So – rather than press an inexplicable coincidence, genuine mourning by the profession is in order – joining with his family, friends and colleagues – for the sad death of troubled Dan Pirron.
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