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Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Keith Monahan who wrote (4741)	7/15/2002 9:30:06 AM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24758

Not the way they did it in the old days: He would be disgusted with what these guys did to his company," says Al Bows, a retired senior partner who, at 88, is the same age as the firm. Mr. Bows, one of the oldest living Big Five auditors, was hired by Mr. Andersen in 1935 in the depths of the Great Depression. . . . As Mr. Bows sat in a small office in his Atlanta condominium, his wife, Helen, jogged his memory. "This would never happen in his day," Mrs. Bows said. "Ask him about the juice company." Mr. Bows took the cue. "There was a big fruit-juice company here in town -- I shouldn't say who. I discovered that the CEO was starting another juice company on the side, to profit for himself. I told him he'd better cut it out or I'd turn him in. He stopped. But he was mad." How did he discover it? "You talk to the secretaries, you comb," he says. "If you saw something, you stopped it. Oh, a good audit was a beautiful thing." . . . He made a mark in Atlanta with one of the nation's earliest private bank audits -- of Trust Co. of Georgia, now SunTrust Bank. Back then, bank audits were almost always performed by government agents who did little more than count cash. Mr. Bows led a brigade of 40 auditors in suits and starched white shirts to the bank. "The accountants spread through the building," he recalls. "It was exciting." They added up the ledgers to make sure the day's activities balanced, then pinpointed flaws in the bank's systems and suggested improvements.[WOW!! Auditors did consulting back then too.] Mr. Bows says Coca-Cola Co. executives hired the firm after hearing of the review. He also landed the credit research company that became Equifax. . . . online.wsj.com