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Comment by watertom | Hacker News Reader

I hope she wasn't surprised. People who listen to their managers get promoted.

The other person was probably told to stop finding problems as well, and he was complying. I once told a manager the only way to not do what I was doing would be for me to be asleep. Hell, maybe it was so easy he could do it in his sleep?

Perhaps this is naïveté on my part, but I imagine that if I worked for an organisation whose explicit purpose is to look for things which need fixing or certify that no known issues are present, I would be surprised if “shoot the messenger” was — even metaphorically — a real policy.

I would also ask myself how far the rot went, because if (for example) this organisation was also supposed to audit the government and yet promoted those who “slept in a cupboard” over those who worked diligently, then I would expect the country to suffer a very large and very surprising economic disaster.

Note it was an internal audit role - not acting as an external auditor working for an accounting company.

While that is worth pointing out, I would still be concerned in such circumstances. As I say, perhaps naively so — I have no familiarity with the norms of that industry.

The problem is when internal auditors highlight major issues it is the internal auditor who is disgraced and fired

Whistleblowers are very rarely welcomed in any business or government context, which is most unfortunate.

Well, she did leave accounting completely and did something else entirely - so I think it is fair to say that she was concerned!

Hi, yes, this is largely how audit firms work. If they find a problem, they will not be hired next year.

That said - don’t despair! The purpose is NOT to catch purposefully-fraudulent CFOs. That’s the SEC’s job. It’s much more of a forcing mechanism for otherwise-honest CFOs: they know they have to justify what they’re doing somehow, and the auditor knows that if something will inevitably blow up anyway, they can’t sign off. So it just arrests the slippery slope when honest mistakes are made.

> arrests the slippery slope

What does that mean? Not a native speaker, dictionary not so helpful

“Slippery slope” is an (often misused) metaphor; the bottom of the slope is generic badness, the top is a good place to be, and the slope is slippery because if you start sliding down it can be very difficult to stop.

While “arrest” normally means a police officer putting someone in handcuffs, it is derived from derived from the French word “arrêt“ meaning 'to stop or stay', and can still be used in that sense.

Thus, “arrest the slippery slope” means “prevent bad behaviour”.

Thanks! Interesting to hear about the origins of the words

I think being told not to find so many problems she could perhaps have coped with - having someone who was apparently unconscious most of the time promoted ahead of her was what really did it.

NB It was financial auditing not IT.

Well, it is clear that he was promoted because he wasn't interested. It allowed the rest of the people there to get away with stuff that they shouldn't have been doing.

Leaving was the best option that your wife had, in such a case you really don't want to stick around until the house burns down.

Is the point, from the company's point of view, to just have some people on its payroll with certain job titles, so looks fine to people outside?

To make gov agencies happy? Or investors? -- who are those who care

(And good if they do mostly nothing)

what's the legal liability in omitting a problem you've found during an audit? not for the auditing company, for the auditor.

It was an internal audit role and she wasn't a professionally qualified accountant.

So no legal risk, but there is still professional risk. When external auditors come in or an issue is found that impacts customers, they could scapegoat their internal (deliberately made useless) team, fire them, and have a go at using that as part of their defense/response. The higher-ups would be ok if they can pull it off, but your wife would've been out a job and with an inability to get a reference from them (beyond the basic: She was employed here from X-Y).

Best plan for everyone is to get out of shady companies like that ASAP.

> shady companies like that

Ok so that's not how things usually work?

In most? companies internal auditors do real work, would you say? (I'm clueless)

In my experience, yes. They certainly don’t tell people to slow down or ignore findings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen

For the individual auditor: if you're a chartered/certified accountant you can get into a lot of hot water, including possible jail time.

Thankfully there are very strong incentives for audit companies not to f-up. They themselves are not audited and are not public. Their reputation means a lot to them.

With this situation, there is a reasonable expectation for EY to lose clients. Partners will also face some consequence. Most likely they will be let go and removed from accreditation by CPA (in the US). There are several high profile cases where partners get sacked[0].

[0]: https://www.ft.com/content/5179fb94-fd6c-11e8-ac00-57a2a8264...

Partly false. We were audited every year by one of our competitors. There is a strong likely hood that the reason she was told to stop finding problems is because the de minimus limit (the dollar figure at which we don't care) is truly, and I mean TRULY massive for the kind of companies that are audited by EY, PWC, KPMG, and Deloitte. I refuse to believe for one second that a serious issue was swept under the rug by a senior or manager.

As for the guy sleeping in cupboards...the staff at those firms reguarly work 80 hour weeks (not the "I work 80 hour weeks counting all kinds of stupid things" but the "I was at the client site or in the home office for 80 hours this week". It was a very common occurence for hard working staff members to take naps at the client (most likely because last night was a 2am night). Promotions at these firms are often very competitive as the organization is an "Up or out" organization designed to chew up fresh college grads.

The peer review is conducted by an independent evaluator, known as a peer reviewer. The AICPA oversees the program, and the review is administered by an entity approved by the AICPA to perform that role. 2. The peer review helps to monitor a CPA firm's accounting and auditing practice (practice monitoring).

>There is a strong likely hood that the reason she was told to stop finding problems is because the de minimus limit (the dollar figure at which we don't care) is truly, and I mean TRULY massive for the kind of companies that are audited by EY, PWC, KPMG, and Deloitte. I refuse to believe for one second that a serious issue was swept under the rug by a senior or manager.

That's a big claim for you to make given that you don't know the company, the size of their clients, or even whether or not anyone went to jail over the proceeding decades.

I tried this once and it resulted in my lowest performance review on record. So, it depends on the manager.

I once had a technical discussion with my manager, he wanted me to use a technical solution that did not work, while making me fully responsible for the result.

In the end I implemented both my solution and his. Mine worked like a charm, his literally caught on fire (it was power electronics development). Got fired anyway...

> he wanted me to use a technical solution that did not work, while making me fully responsible for the result

Just say "yes", and work on your job-hunting instead.

Which solution did they end up using, if any? (Or was his damaged permanently because of catching fire)

Makes me slightly wonder if the manager had hidden motivations and didn't want the project to succeed

They hired a junior make sure he would do as he was told to, and developed my solution. In the end, “my solution” was what anyone would have developed after some research on the problem.

The manager was one of the company owners, so he was well motivated, but he was an academic with little world experience that though he knew better than the industry.

The largest pop/fire I saw in some past power electronics work was a poor implementation in trying to combine the output of multiple DC-DC converters. The original caught fire in front of a potential customer, in a demo. What I saw was a repeat of the experiment, in the lab. A manager that would always say "just add more capacitance" was involved. I guess firing and fires go with managers like that.

It is not always a manager's motivation to get you promoted. Sometimes their motivation is to keep you where you are.

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