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PwC Auditors Arrested In Satyam Fraud Inquiry
theodp writes "Indian police arrested two employees from the affiliate of PricewaterhouseCoopers who audited Satyam Computer Services, the IT outsourcing giant at the center of the nation's largest fraud inquiry. The move comes after Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju said he had fabricated $1 billion of assets and confessed to making up more than 10,000 employees to siphon money from the software company. State Farm Insurance has severed its ties with Satyam, citing uncertainty about the company's future as 'the only factor responsible for the termination of the contract,' which will reportedly affect at least 400 on-site Satyam employees. Other customers, including GE, are standing by Satyam, one of the top recipients of H-1B and L visas (so much for those $500 Fraud Prevention and Detection fees!)."
As an East Indian, do these corporate assholes not realise the extent of their greed?
Due to the US Economy
1. Outsourcing is getting slashed as jobs need to to be retained on US soil.(rightfully so I guess)
2. Crap like above effing kills whatever reputation we have, there enough jokes flying around about the lack of quality or whatever from Indian work. This just made things worse.
Now this is not a flamebait, or troll post, I am not bashing my fellow Indians or the Americans/whoever.
I am however rightfully pissed at these corporate assholes who did this. There are folks who had purchased homes, property rates were rising, and now they'll plummet, people will be laid off.
Most of all, the company's name was Satyam (truth), and this came out of it. All of us Indians who work overseas have to deal with this in addition to the rest the usual crap.
To you effing lying executives, own up to your crap, you've put all of us in misery.
-Angry Brown Dude.
...confessed to making up more than 10,000 employees to siphon money from the software company.
This must be what Brooks meant about the best programmers being 10 times more productive.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Indian police arrested two employees from the affiliate of PricewaterhouseCoopers who audited Satyam Computer Services, the IT outsourcing giant at the center of the nation's largest fraud inquiry.
Let's see, companies ship thousands of jobs to places that don't have the reporting and oversight capabilities we have here (or at least used to have) and are outside the jurisdiction of US courts in order to save a few bucks at the expense of several thousand local employees. They deal with the language barrier, the cost of travel, a culture where bribery can be a way of life, and time zone issues. Then said companies get taken to the cleaners because they can't audit their operations on that side of the world properly.
Hmmmm, let me be the first to say HA-HA! I guess we need new batteries in the sympathy meter because it's showing a big, fat ZERO right now.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Looks like the submtitter likes to bash on the H1B visas, but in this case where is the H1B fraud? Satyam seems to have brought in employees to work on-site and they seem to working there. I see no hint of H1B fraud anywhere in the links provided at all.
This space for rent.
is that "Satyam" is truth in Sanskrit - or even more, something like ultimate truth...
One problem is that traditional audits really don't work very well as a rule. There are too many ways of beating an audit and the cost of an audit often is greater than the stealing it reveals.
It is hard to believe that companies that exist to sell auditing service are not well aware of these problems and therefore sort of corrupt in general as they often are not offering a reality based service.
Spoke to someone in does IT compliance for her company and the one thing she did not understand was how an audit of Cash Balances could go so wrong. After all a lot of things can be faked, but the cash on hand can always be verfied (by calling up banks, etc). PWC's actions were either criminally negligent or just criminal. I hope they bite the dust.
Pricewaterhouse Coopers is a huge company and actually audits 40 percent of companies in the FTSE 100 Index.
Yepp, Pricewaterhouse Coopers is one of the Big Four: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_auditors., one of the best, without question.
But in these matters, I tend to wonder if the auditors are in cahoots with the company that they are supposed to br auditing.
On another note, an executive once told me: "I can't steal $100 from my company. We have enough controls in place to detect that. Now, $100,000,000, you can do that, and nobody would notice."
At "The Economist" quipped on the Bernard Madoff case, "if you are going to steal, steal big."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
They were listed in US and have to follow SOX. And stop rubbishing the Indian laws already. The executives are already in prison. On the other hand isn't Bernie Madoff still in his penthouse.
What's going on in India right now is no different than what went on the US in the late 90's with the dot-com boom. During the boom, demand far, far outstripped supply so people who could barely *spell* HTML were being hired as web designers and 90% of them were incompetent.
Same thing is happening in India right now, with approximately the same results. I have a feeling that one of the fallouts of this global credit crunch is that, just like the eventual dot-BOMB in 2000 and 2001, India is going face a major market correction.
The bottom line is that this is not an "India" thing or a "US" thing. It's a basic Economics 101 thing. Let's try not to make it too personal.
The
The problem is what all those geniuses managing companies in rich countries, those wonderful CEOs that don't know that when something sounds too good to be true most probably it is.
Companies in rich countries were offered this pool of people that would charge you peanuts for doing top tier work, so they outsourced full operations to teams of unexperienced and often overworked people.
The reality in Indina towns was and is very different. If all these people were in a place without companies, infrastructure and in general an environment not conducive to develop their knowledge, then how it come they could be the experienced folk that could replace experienced people in rich countires? The answer is tha they weren't in general terms. They are enthusiastic newcomers that have not seen a mission critical system in their short professional carriers.
The best proof that rich countries' companies were far too gullible is that as soon as people in India and other poor localities become any good, they immidiately switch jobs or immigrate, demanding higher salaries that approach or meet rich countries' standards, so normally the people working outsourced or remotely for companies in rich countries are either relatively novices or not the brigthest spark since thay have not managed to move on to better jobs.
And yet still now, companies continue to do this, they don't see people in India as resources to be nurtured who require training. Forget about loyalty, our Indian counterparts are not stupid: they know they are replacing people in other countries that are technically more proficient (they are working with them day in day out, often learning as much as they can from them before replacing them) and they realize that if people with a broader depth of knowledge and expertise are dumped with such abandon, they surely can't expect to fare any better.
The blame is elsewhere. Those same CEOs that were flying private jets and buying expensive decoration for their offices bought this fairy tale system in which you replace knowledgeable people with almost beginners.