Category: Valeant Pharmaceuticals
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Recidivism and Risk Management: Barry Minkow Goes Back to the Slammer
No comments on Recidivism and Risk Management: Barry Minkow Goes Back to the SlammerSon, always remember: some day, somewhere, a guy is going to come to you and show…
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Two Obsolete Models: Global Financial Reporting and Audit — And Pimping Spam Viagra With AOL’s Rogue E-Mail
Last week came a very peculiar e-mail, from an old and trusted friend whose judgments…
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Whence The Next Fresh Accounting Scandal? The Ominous Threat of A Shoe That’s Yet to Drop
There’s a folk tale’s moral about the aggressive bird, who filches a whole length of sausage…
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Replace the Big Four with Audits by Government? More Heat in the Kitchen — and Less Light
What will it take, once for all, to lay forever the ghastly fantasy that audits done…
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Evolution of the Accounting Model: What Would Darwin Say?
So where will the initiative for innovation really come from, in the inevitable but elusive evolution…
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Coincidence, Causation and Apple’s Stock Price: Further Lessons from the UBS Dress Code
1 comment on Coincidence, Causation and Apple’s Stock Price: Further Lessons from the UBS Dress CodeMy MBA students in Risk Management study closely the hazards of conflating coincidence and causation –…
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Accounting Standards: Rules or Principles? Lessons From the UBS Dress Code
Goldman Sachs has snatched from its US clients the windfall chance to front-run Facebook's IPO, by…
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The Audit Model Is Broken — “Re:Balance” Has Its Third Birthday — And The Message Hasn’t Changed
And lo, it came to pass in the dark time of winter, that there was a…
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Holiday Gifts in Bernie Madoff’s Bankruptcy: A Widow Does Her Bit — and the Banks Will Too
Holiday gifts arrived early in December for the circle of players around the wreckage that was…
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Merry Christmas 2010 — And a Happy New Year to All
From civilization’s very beginnings, tribes in the north came together on the shortest day of the…
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Will the Auditors’ Real Clients Please Stand Up? You’re Lost Among the Mixed Messages
No comments on Will the Auditors’ Real Clients Please Stand Up? You’re Lost Among the Mixed MessagesI try to raise the sense of my students in Risk Management for trends, patterns and…
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Disintegration of the Big Four Audit Firms? As They Tell the House of Lords, “We Don’t See That on the Horizon”
The epitaph for the private delivery of audit services to the world’s large global companies was…
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The House of Lords Looks at the Role of Auditors: And Then Everyone Went for Tea
Here’s a good way to increase the chances for satisfaction: start with very low expectations. That…
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The European Commission’s Green Paper on Audit: After the Posturing, an EC Agenda for Real Progress
Say this for EC Internal Markets and Services Commissioner Michel Barnier’s call for public comments on…
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The Big Four Accounting Firms Are Down to Critical Mass: Says the Financial Times – So It Must Be Official
In the country where the independent audit was invented, back in the Victorian era, the Lex…
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Book Review: Tony Judt Has a Few Last Words
Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt, Penguin Press, 237 pages “Ill fares the land, to…
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The EC’s Green Paper, “Audit Policy: Lessons from the Crisis”: The Bureaucrats Blow Another Chance
"We've gotta do something, They"re serious this time. "You know what we gotta do. Toga…
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In the News: Crain’s Chicago Business on the Funk Pervading the Accounting Industry — And My Five-Word Quote
Steve Strahler reports in yesterday’s edition of Crain’s – here – that “revenues are down,…
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Hailing a Driver: Not Just a Ride to the Airport
Reminders of the petty scale of our daily problems come often as a subtle tap…
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Dodd-Frank Lets Small-Company Auditors Off the Internal Controls Hook: Putting a Partial Lid on the Sarbox
At least one piece of the Dodd-Frank legislation now has a ribbon neatly tied around it:…
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Re-Branding at PricewaterhouseCoopers — OMG, It’s Like Totally Awesome!
What are they thinking, in the leadership suites of PricewaterhouseCoopers? As reported by Caleb Newquist (here),…
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Does Anyone Really Want to Be an Accountant? A Tailgate Survey
Last Saturday I was part of that great autumnal experience – tail-gating and a football game…
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Business Models and the Search for Success: A Tale of Two Cities’ Bicycles
Summer’s over. And with the fresh school term, I’ve started a very exciting new teaching…
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Guest Post at the FEI Blog: When Litigation Kills the Accounting Profession — Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned!
Edith Orenstein's FEI Blog is a "must read" — a thorough and lucid map of the…
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Goldman’s Settlement with the SEC, and the Fragile Future of the Fabulous Fab
Even in the depths of summer, the settlement agreed last month by Goldman Sachs to resolve…
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Lessons in Risk Management: A Hierarchy of Learning from Ignorance
The seemingly indestructible baseball legend Satchel Paige asked, “How old would you be, if you didn’t…
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The Big Four’s UK Firms Pick Up Non-Executive Directors — And Then …?
All the girls get prettier at closin’ time – Mickey Gilley, 1976 A…
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Happy Vacation — Even the Crooks Are Taking a Break
When a felon’s not engaged in his employment, Or maturing his felonious little plans, His capacity…
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Sarbanes-Oxley and the PCAOB: The Supreme Court’s Own Goal
On this last Monday there were two non-events, both with heavy political overtones: First was the…
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Seidman Gets a New Trial in Bankest — And How Does Winning Feel?
“Never mud-wrestle with a pig. You end up covered with pig-shit. And the pig actually likes…
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Summertime, And The Living Is Easy — At Least For Now
“If you’ve nothing nice to say…. come sit by me.” — Dorothy Parker With…
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Drilling Down Into BP’s Risk Management: A Process As Blown As The Well
“I never went to bed with an ugly woman. But I’ve sure woke up with a…
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The SEC’s Mary Schapiro on the Myths of GAAP/IFRS Convergence: The Lady Doth Protest Too Much
Local news item: “Last night the high school drama club played Shakespeare. Shakespeare…
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Trust Matters: Charlie Green and I on Ethics Training, Corporate Standards and Society’s Limited Expectations from Government
I talk often with Charlie Green — author, speaker and consultant, and expert on the theme…
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Goldman Sachs and the Fabulous Future of Fabrice Tourre
Is there a future at Goldman Sachs for Fabrice Tourre? The self-styled “fabulous Fab” was the…
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How Dangerous is the Two-Billion Dollar Suit Against PwC Over Iceland’s Glitnir Bank? The Answer is Blowin’ in the Wind
Especially for PricewaterhouseCoopers, the bad news out of Iceland just won’t let up. First it was…
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The Future of Goldman Sachs: Sound, Fury, and the Human Appetite for Risk
If correctly read, the thermometer on the temperature of the body politic suggests that the…
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Valuing Goldman’s Next Sh*tty Deal: How About a Little Wager?
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. — Ecclesiastes…
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Regulating Derivatives: After SEC vs. Goldman Sachs, Can You Keep Them Down on the Farm?
Whether and how to regulate the financial institutions’ creation and trading of exotic derivatives? Who should…
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The SEC Strikes Goldman Sachs — Now Will Goldman Strike Out?
As the great baseball umpire Bill Klem said, about whether a pitch was a ball or…