Filed in archive Accounting by leon on November 13, 2007

What's wrong with this picture? When bean counting giant Grant Thornton asked chief financial officers and senior comptrollers whether they thought auditors were responsible for detecting any and all fraud, a whopping 82 per cent answered in the affirmative. At the same time, 62 per cent of the respondents said they thought it was possible for them to intentionally misstate their financial statement to their auditor.

The Grant Thornton survey makes sobering reading.

Especially the revelation that nearly half of these financial experts had never heard of XBRL, or eXtensible Business Reporting Language which is being hailed as the future of financial reporting. SEC chairman Christopher Cox is the chief cheer leader for XBRL.

Related Entries:

Search Engines team up to combat click fraud - 08 August 2006
How to beat identity fraud - 28 November 2006
Fraud and delinquent communities - 16 May 2007
Green light for cross-border fraud - 25 May 2007
Accountants lost with standards and XBRL - 18 May 2008

« Who got rich going to Rio... | Main | Mapping the climate chang... »

Permalink: Accountants and fraud

Tags: Grant Thornton survey fraud XBRL 2007 accountants+fraud

Trackback: http://publish.creative-weblogging.com/publish/mt-tb.pl/101311

Addthis

Ask

Blinklist

del.icio.us

Digg

Fark

Facebook

Google

Lycos

Ma.gnolia

Mr Wong

Netscape

Netvousz

Newsvine

StumbleUpon

Slashdot

Tailrank

Technorati

Wink

Yahoo

Vote for Accountants and fraud:

Currently 9.60/10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Rating: 9.60 out of 5 vote(s) cast.

Response from: Lynn Northrup (11/26/08 8:54am)

I think accountants and auditors need to move past the checklist mentality and start thinking about how the wool can pull over their eyes. In this economy we'll begin to see more effort to misstate financial statements because of the higher level of pressure. This will be true especially with privately owned companies who are struggling to comply with loan covenants.