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!)."

Comments

Great, more fuel to the flames

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Great, more fuel to the flames

[metlin]

The problem is that as a developing economy, a lot of people in tech in India took up engineering or IT because it is a great chance to make money.

While there were a few talented techs and a few people who loved tech for its own sake, the very attitude in that region is to study something that would get you a well paying job. Most families there push for engineering or medicine - maybe law or finance every once in a while. Doing anything else, immaterial of your where your talents and interests lie is looked down upon.

The end result is that for every talented person, there are a ton of others who have no clue whatsoever. This is made worse by corporate greed by the various outsourcing companies who just use folks with backgrounds in anything vaguely technical, "train" them in IT and get them to do the grunt work. These people do not understand technology, do not care for technology and are nothing more than grunt workers, every single one of them. Wipro? TCS? Infosys? Satyam? They are ALL the same.

IT in India is a joke. The vast majority of them have no clue, and worse yet, do not have a passion for what they do. The problem is endemic, and results in poor quality code, service and the worst of all - attitude.

Re:Great, more fuel to the flames

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the points you make are specific to India or any country for that matter. I don't want to start a flamewar but I have seen enough clueless non-Indian programmers who had obviously no passion and were doing the jobs just for the money.

Indian programmers take the blame as they are the most hated ones to offshoring and H-1B and there are a large number of them in that field. If you try to recruit a similar number of programmers in _any_ country you are likely going to end up saying "vast majority of them are crap" .

Acknowledging the problem is a good first start but blaming everything on Indian programmers and making highly generalized statements like "IT in India is a joke" doesn't help anything except may be making you feel better. In my experience though Indian guys lack the "self marketing" and most always do not go the extra mile to make the work "look" quality but otherwise the code does what it was asked to do. A little effort in those directions could go a long way.

On the other hand I get quite pissed by the programmers wanting to tout their work as quality and doing largely pointless rhetorical things in the name of differentiating - it adds little value.

Pick your poison - you pay less for one, more for other.

Re:Great, more fuel to the flames

[Mohan S]

I'm Indian. I think such flame baits are a bloody joke. Most Americans think they have god given or endowed knowledge to do things better just by the gift of the gab. How else do you explain Bush getting elected twice?? I've been in the US and have worked with so called successful execs. All this talk of incompetencies apply to Americans too. Like all capitalist tendencies, Americans have learned to pay less for incompetencies, thats all. And they have cost savings to justify the action. I'll bet the US can do with a fifth of the IT and still do better if they are multi-skilled and committed. Mohan

Let's check the sympathy meter

[HangingChad]

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.

Re:Let's check the sympathy meter

[oxygen_deprived]

"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"

-------
Yeah sure. Enron was an Indian firm. So was Lehmann. How exactly did the US jurisdictions and having the reporting and oversight prevent them from happening ?

Then said companies get taken to the cleaners because they can't audit their operations on that side of the world properly.

-------
In case you missed the TFA, PwC is from your side of the world, and are complicit in the fraud. Here in India, we have a proverb, which roughly translates to "When you point a finger at someone, 3 of your fingers point to you"

H1B Fraud?

[recoiledsnake]

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.

The irony

[no-body]

is that "Satyam" is truth in Sanskrit - or even more, something like ultimate truth...

Re: Of course this is an INDIAN company

[milkasing]

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.

It's just like the dot-com boom

[ShinmaWa]

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.