EDITORIAL: Bad defending, bad goalkeeping in financial scandals
What about other defenders who should have been there: company directors, who bear ultimate responsibility?
A senior audit partner at one of SA’s big firms uses a football analogy to talk about the fire that auditors have come under for their role in recent financial scandals. The auditors — the goalkeepers — have taken a lot of blame for failing to catch these. But what about other defenders who should have been there: company directors, who bear ultimate responsibility? Questions about the role of auditors and that of directors are at centre stage after a week in which embattled KPMG was fired by the auditor-general. This followed the disaster of its VBS Mutual Bank audit. And Steinhoff held an annual general meeting that could only be described as bizarre. Steinhoff’s market value has collapsed from R300bn to just over R11bn after it revealed "accounting irregularities" late in 2017. Though it has emerged that Markus Jooste, who resigned as CEO in December, may have conducted some fancy financial engineering to inflate profits and asset values, there is still precious little hard infor...
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