The PCAOB’s Inspection Reports Nibble at PwC -- A Reader Asks, “Where’s the Beef?”

Food beyond compare

Food beyond belief

Mix it in a mincer

And pretend it's beef

Kidney of a horse

Liver of a cat

Filling up the sausages

With this and that

-- Thénardier, “Master of the House,” Les Misérables

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board – overseer of the accounting profession in the United States – got in a snit recently, perceiving that PwC was lax in its efforts to remediate the “significant audit performance deficiencies” that the agency asserted in its 2008 and 2009 inspection reports.

Expressing pique as it only could, on March 7, the PCAOB released to an indifferent public the previously undisclosed “Part II” portions of those reports.

Did it arouse the aforesaid public to care? Or even to notice?

A predictable handful of the large accounting firms’ most reliably ardent critics did weigh in (here and here).

Meanwhile a measured comparison comes to mind – the teapot-scale tempest aroused in Britain and Ireland this winter, over the discovery of equine DNA in samples of meatballs and ravioli – not, enforcers emphasized, because of any actual consumer health hazard, but over alleged deficiencies in labeling and transparency.

On which my perspective takes from the attitude of my daughter, a situational vegetarian who, on assignment this last year in Southeast Asia, has extended her palate and appetite to include crickets, dog conch and scorpion.

In the European kerfuffle, a libertarian-oriented omnivore – believing in both cultural differences and regulatory intervention only to the minimum necessary – would favor a simple modified label: “May contain horsemeat”. 

As for the PCAOB, the question has to be asked -- How can an oversight function claim either legitimacy or effectiveness, that:

• Decides for itself how to define and identify not a legal or professional standards failure, but an elusive “significant audit performance deficiency.”

• Keeps score under its own methods and incentives, like a traffic meter maid sent on patrol with a book of tickets and a daily quota.

• Must under cover of confidentiality conceal both the names and the detailed particulars of its self-defined offenses.

• And then in a burst of ill-temper, decides for itself whether the undisclosed substance of a remedial effort is satisfactory within unmeasured and unarticulated standards.

It’s no wonder, for two reasons, that PwC saw no reason to pursue its right of appeal to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

First, because PwC negotiated the ability to append to the PCAOB’s release a pronouncement of its commitment to virtuous conduct, positively radiant with unctuous platitudes.

But second and more especially, because under the current model for compliance with the securities laws, under which there is no available alternative, the Big Four-dominated market for large-company audit services is armor-plated against the PCAOB’s pop-gun arsenal. 

Law enforcement, rules compliance and social norm-setting in general -- in contexts that are controversial, subjective and incomprehensible to the laity -- are subject to credibility challenges and diminution of the authority of their arbiters:

• The Supreme Court’s obscure definition of obscenity, “I know it when I see it” (Stewart, J., Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964).

• The theological search for distinctions between mortal and venial sins.

• The nuances and complexity of sport, from soccer’s off-side and cricket’s leg-before-wicket to hockey’s high-sticking and baseball’s rules on balks and infield flies.

• The subtleties of line-drawing between shrewd and informed investing and insider trading, or the bribery of officials and accepted business facilitation.

Here -- the mutual hypocrisy in the whole sorry audit regulatory environment is pervasive:

The PCAOB gets to pretend it is engaged in a meaningful exercise, worthy of being taken seriously in the capital marketplace.

The audit firms are obliged to pretend that they take the cost and impositions of the inspection process as something more than the de facto license fee paid as a nuisance to maintain their franchise.

And to the limited extent they really care, financial statement users can only search elsewhere for meaningful assurance, beyond the model unchanged since the Victorian era and long since degraded into obsolescence. 

Critics of this dysfunctional structure are entitled to their finger-pointing cynicism. But their bile is misplaced – until and unless they unite in advocating an achievable effort to re-engineer the entire system of reporting and assurance that today only fosters ambiguity, inconsequence and disrespect.

Until which, at the foot of each PCAOB inspection report should be appended an adapted version of the suggested European meat label – “May contain horse-sh*t.”

 

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Comments

[Jason]

My Romanian colleague asks, will the PCAOB institute Computer Assisted Counter Audit Techniques (CACAT), so they can make a complete farce of this procedure?

[marge duffy]

Loved this issue, especially the last line! You know how to call it like you see it...