semiconeng, You make it sound like the entire Arthur Anderson LLP is somehow on this Enron things, and that they are all corrupt. The fact is that these Big 5 accounting firms are extremely decentralized, they have 1000s of partners, and every partner is more or less an independent business.
Than there is the separation of Anderson's traditional business (Audit) vs. Consulting, who have almost nothing to do with the traditional business. The Consulting is probably who worked with AMD.
Joe
--O.K., I'm a reasonable person, I could be wrong, so I tried putting myself in Ole Jerry Sanders place, and I ran a scenerio on what I would be saying to myself ASSUMING No collusion on the part of AMD/AA. Here's the thought process that came to me (doing my best JS impersonation).
Damn, those AA guys are really screwed up. Bad luck us picking them for our Quantispeed verification. If Congress starts lobing crap at AA, some of that crap might rub off on us. I can't BELIEVE it, here we are with good QuantiSpeed Data, and just because some jerks got greedy, now we have a problem.
I KNOW!!!!!, all I need to do is get SOME OTHER Accounting Firm to look at the work that AA did, and reverify the numbers. That way, if AA goes down the tubes, we can say that OUR DATA has been verified INDEPENDENTLY! SHOOT, since most of the Company is riding on the success of QuantiSpeed, the extra cost for another Auditor is insignificant, especially since we just came into some extra "debt cash".
--That solution took me about 5 minutes to think up. I doubt that I'm any smarter that the Corporate Staff that advises Jerry, so I've got to figure AT LEAST one of them got the same idea.
--I'm willing to wait and se if AMD choses a similar solution. IF THEY DO, then I would be willing to admit that I am wrong, and there was probably no collusion between AMD and Arthur Anderson on "Verifying" (cough) Quantispeed Data.
--IF..... However, AMD does nothing, and continues to list AA as the "verifier" of the QuantiSpeed Data, then I can only assume that AMD is either AT BEST Incompetent, and can't see the AA Problem in front of them, OR AT WORST, they don't want any other auditor looking at the data, most likely because it is false.
--How's That???? Fair Enough??
Semi |
