Not a great month for accountants. First KPMG's woes continued with a senior US tax official blasting the firm for putting "profits over professionalism" with the abusive tax shelters in the US that prosecutors now say are behind the largest case of its kind in US history. In other words, the implication was that KPMG had been heading in the same direction as Andersen, putting profits above ethics and making sure it never met a dollar it didn't like. A few days earlier, a US court had refused bail for a former KPMG executive accused of engineering a piece of tax shelter fraud peddled by the firm. Then at the end of the week, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board found audit deficiencies at two of the big four, Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Why is this important? Because accountants have an important public role. They are supposed to be the gatekeepers who separate the good from the bad. They are supposed to ensure trust, a point well made by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker three years ago. Markets rely on trust, and accountants play an important role keeping trust in place.