7/4       Read this and believe this guy is understating the issue- is has
        nothing to do with auditing, afterall every report which was
        released by enron, global crossing and wcom forever have been
        audited and were signed off by very high ranking guys. The
        "audit" is not the problem. Its is corporation which is the
        problem. Auditors take numbers that corps given them and sign off
        that the "accounting" is correct. Auditors don't look at actual
        invoices and costs and put the money where is really should and
        compare against what the corp said. Most auditing is just
        proceadural bullshit which investors/public don't understand.
        Like when an audit occurs it starts with an operating procedures
        guide, the auditor reads the OSR (operating proceadures) and then
        spot checks the procedure- THEY DO NOT check the numbers- the
        idea is that if procedures are followed than numbers are
        accurate. For instance you read a lot about how boards of
        directors signed off on a lot of crap which they should not have.
        The auditors job is not to check to see if the crap "should" have
        been signed off on they only make sure that is "was" signed off
        on as that is what the procedure calls for and that is all the
        audit requires.
          When I audited time sheets for DWP (department of water and
        power), I only had to make sure that timesheets were signed, the
        work accomplished and the hours worked were irrelevant and not
        checked in an audit. It was not my job to verify that the work
        completed had anything to do with the northridge earthquake- it
        was only to check to see if the time card was signed by
        supervisor as that is all the proceadure stipulated.
          So although I have never been involved with a full blown audit to
        see all the little pieced which go together- I have an idea of
        how they work and have known for a long long time that they are
        just bogus and do not actually verify if the numbers were
        correct. As I have written previously when I reviewed Level 3
        books I found 700M in double booking or not accurate booking
        (exactly what wcom exposed). What we did was just instead of
        reporting the error we just slowly worked the error off the books
        by doing 150M adjustments now and then and no one was the wiser.