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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!)."
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
that the US is now even outsourcing corporate accounting fraud.
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.
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.
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.
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