Thursday, January 8, 2009

Satyam Scam - Jan 8, 2009

After the Enron scandal of October 2001, which had brought not only the management under scanner but also its accounting firm Arthur Andersen and the same case is now the Satyam''s chairman confessing to fraud. The spotlight turns on auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers that seems to have missed out huge craters in Satyam''s books. Sebi Chairman, CB Bhave said, "The management''s responsibility and the responsibility of the entity auditing these accounts are the issues that we will need to go into and see where exactly the failure has occurred".

Ved Jain, President of ICAI, said, "It''s a very serious issue. People repose so much of faith in auditors and in what they do. If we find any of them at fault, we will take very strict action".

Even as the investigators question top management of Satyam, the burden is likely to be shared by the audit firm, which has not explained how it missed the fraud, for ''several years''. Raju had said earlier, "The gap in the balance sheet has arisen purely on account of inflated profits over a period of last several years".

According to the Secretary General of FICCI, Amit Mitra, first the internal audits are carried on and after that there is an external audit, that is, a reputed firm from outside the company looks into the accounts. "That too failed", said Mitra.

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