Hacker News Reader

Quick reminder for anyone who might have missed it:

Accenture is a spinoff from Anderson Accounting.

Do with that knowledge what you will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture#Emergence_of_Accentu...

This is a useful bit of knowledge, but to guard against people making irrational judgments about Accenture, it's important to note that (1) It was primarily Anderson's consulting divisions that went to Accenture, and (2) these large auditing firms have offices all over the US and world, and in these types of cases, it was really only a branch or two that were complicit in the fraud.

In the same way that we shouldn't condemn the employees of <INSERT TECH COMPANY> because senior leaders decided to <Censor/Abuse/Manipulate users> we shouldn't condemn otherwise ethical accountants because of the misdeeds of their colleagues - especially when they pass more stringent ethical requirements than developers.

Ironically, people couldn't differentiate the isolated incident, and AA liquidated/sold because no one wanted to do business with them. [0]

[0] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen#Demise

"Ironically, people couldn't differentiate the isolated incident, and AA liquidated/sold because no one wanted to do business with them."

"Ironically" is not the word you should be looking for, there. "Fittingly", or "Unsurprisingly", perhaps. Even if you know not all the apples in the barrel were bad, you know that it was a barrel with more than one bad apple, so you throw that barrel out.

Ironically, people often dismiss the scale of a problem by saying it was limited to a few "bad apples", when the point of the apple/barrel metaphor is that one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch, so having one bad apple in it is just as bad as every apple being rotten.

Does that one work?

I think unfortunately may have been a better word for the parent, but your apples metaphor doesn't make sense in this case.

The tech examples will often involve employees directly responsible for building, improving and maintaining the systems of abuse that are central to the ill deeds of the senior leaders you're referring to. The senior leaders can't do what they do without those systems.

This concept is fundamentally why 4,000 of Google's employees staged a protest against Google working on AI systems for the military. They have an inkling about what such systems will be used for.

So it begs the obvious question about how complicit you are if you build software systems that you know are going to be used for immoral things; that you know ahead of time how they're going to be used by said senior leadership. To say nothing of the fact that often said systems are built for the sole purpose of enabling abuse, so there's very little question about the line of moral responsibility (whether of privacy or in the aiding of censorship in authoritarian nations, et al). This obviously isn't a new debate within tech though, it goes all the way back in the industry (eg IBM's counting machines).

> how complicit you are if you build software systems that you know are going to be used for immoral things

There's another path to not building and not participating it. It might be possible to be subversive and design these systems to best fit your values:

"My bias was always to build decentralization into the net. That way it would be hard for one group to gain control. I didn’t trust large central organizations. It was just in my nature to distrust them." -- Robert Taylor

https://theymadethat.com/people/l8tu24/bob-taylor

The company now known as Accenture was spun off in 1989, and was not involved with Enron.

I've seen a couple comments about Arthur Andersen, Enron, and Accenture in this thread and I just want to detail everything that went down in that situation.

Full Disclosure: I recently left a position with one of Accenture's subsidiary. I also hate that company.

The Supreme Court actually vacated Arthur Andersen's conviction for their actions in Enron. The SC basically said the jury instructions were too vague, and the jury could have believed that Arthur Andersen thought they did everything right and legally but still voted to convict. Arthur Andersen was never retried since there wasn't much left at that point anyway.

Arthur Andersen Accounting (or whatever they formally called themselves) and Arthur Andersen Consulting had already broken up into two different companies. They set up some weird agreement where the more profitable of the two would pay a cut of the profit difference to the other company. Consulting is always more profitable than accounting (which is why all the Big 4 have gotten back into even in the age of Sarbane-Oxley, where they can't audit a company they consult for), so Arthur Andersen consulting had to send a big-ass check to the accountants every quarter and they wanted to get out of that. The blow up of Arthur Andersen accounting presented the perfect opportunity. Arthur Andersen Consulting changed their name to Accenture to distance themselves from the Enron scandal, but it was mostly PR because they didn't have anything to do with Enron anyway.

McKinsey, however, had consultants all through Enron. I believe Skilling worked for McKinsey right out of college and threw them a ton of work. There's no way people at McKinsey didn't know what Enron was up to, but they somehow got off scot-free

> Andersen Consulting changed their name to Accenture to distance themselves from the Enron scandal

The name change was in place before Enron went bankrupt, and was a condition of the settlement with Andersen Consulting. It was very fortunate timing indeed.

McKinsey wasn't their legal auditor, blessing their financial statements. That's like saying any management consultant or contractor at Enron at the time should be punished. That makes no sense.

McKinsey was far more than just a management consultant for Enron. They were deeply embedded in the decision making process and even if they didn't do anything outright criminal they certainly share moral responsibility for Enron's misdeeds.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myt...

You're both right and wrong. The auditor has professional ethical and legal obligations. Clearly that is a special case of being particularly culpable.

However, everyone who knew what was happening and the scam being run should probably have been deemed complicit

Andersen was willing to certify pretty much anything these companies wanted to do as fully legal and above-board, because these were big clients and Andersen didn't want to lose them to some other accounting firm by inconveniently insisting that they keep honest books.

Anecdotally, this happens at all levels of accounting.

I've hired two accountants in my lifetime. Both times I was asked something along the lines of, "I can be as as clean or dirty as you want me to be. Just let me know now, before we get started."

I'm reminded of an anecdote I heard once: When interviewing an accountant, the founder showed the accountant some financial and asked the accountant "What story do these numbers tell?" to which the accountant replied "What story do you want them to tell?"

"What story do you want them to tell?"

Welcome to the non-black-and-white world of gray. That mentality goes far beyond just accounting. Anything beyond a basic measurement is open to interpretation.

It is definitely true that accounting is not at all straightforward, it's actually really challenging to figure out what's really going on in an enterprise, it's not just some arithmetic.

Which is why an accountant who is good at figuring out what's really going on is so valuable.

An accountant who specializes in making the numbers tell the story the CEO wants them to tell is not an accountant who can tell you anything useful about the company's financials. If you just want propaganda/marketting instead of accounting I guess that's fine, so long as you don't end up going to jail for it.

That things are open to interpretation doesn't mean there's no difference between trying to figure out what's going on, and trying to spin it to what you'd like to be going on.

Like a boss whose reports only tell him what he wants to hear. I'd tell the "what story do you want them to tell" guy -- what would I pay you for if you're just going to tell me the story I already know I'd like to be true?

Of course, plenty of people do pay that guy, because they're just trying to put one over on everyone else.

That kind of anecdote comes in an insane number of variations. Even if it's based in truth, it's probably been distorted through retelling.

In other words, don't try to pass off jokes as anecdotes.

Maybe you'll find it interesting that the Greek word for joke is anecdoto.

That is interesting, thank you.

Shrug. Then add me to the list of someone who had this asked of me directly. Twice.

That is the complete opposite of any of my experience.

CPAs are generally extremely conservative. And unless you are paying them immense amounts of money, they are almost always reticent to do anything even remotely risky.

After all, their license and this livelyhood is on the line.

I've been a chartered accountant in a past career.

From my experience a sizeable percentage Chartered Accountant's / CPAs are happy to do whatever they are directed to as long there is plausible deniability (and you can generally find that if you look closely (or don't look closely enough).

I don't see this as special to accountant's I see it as a function of human nature.

>Andersen was willing to certify pretty much anything these companies wanted to do as fully legal and above-board, because these were big clients and Andersen didn't want to lose them to some other accounting firm by inconveniently insisting that they keep honest books

According to friends in the Big 4, this seems like standard practice.

As much as Sarbanes-Oxley can be a pain in the ass there are reason for its existance. And having n to change your external auditor ever so often is a good thing. As is bein SOX compliant in general. Companies that aren't or just barely tend to have some ugly, not illegal just ugly, stuff going on sometimes.

Reminds me of https://www.ft.com/content/c1231f40-f695-11e7-88f7-5465a6ce1... . Excerpt from article -

--------------

Ramalinga Raju, Satyam’s then chairman, admitted to overstating the company’s cash balance by $1bn, as well as exaggerating the company’s headcount by 13,000. “It was like riding a tiger, not knowing when to get off without being eaten,” he wrote of the growing deception. The company later admitted that the total irregularities amounted to $1.7bn.

----------------------

How these things get past auditors is beyond me.