Accenture is a spinoff from Anderson Accounting.
Do with that knowledge what you will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture#Emergence_of_Accentu...
In the same way that we shouldn't condemn the employees of <INSERT TECH COMPANY> because senior leaders decided to <Censor/Abuse/Manipulate users> we shouldn't condemn otherwise ethical accountants because of the misdeeds of their colleagues - especially when they pass more stringent ethical requirements than developers.
Ironically, people couldn't differentiate the isolated incident, and AA liquidated/sold because no one wanted to do business with them. [0]
[0] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen#Demise
"Ironically" is not the word you should be looking for, there. "Fittingly", or "Unsurprisingly", perhaps. Even if you know not all the apples in the barrel were bad, you know that it was a barrel with more than one bad apple, so you throw that barrel out.
Does that one work?
This concept is fundamentally why 4,000 of Google's employees staged a protest against Google working on AI systems for the military. They have an inkling about what such systems will be used for.
So it begs the obvious question about how complicit you are if you build software systems that you know are going to be used for immoral things; that you know ahead of time how they're going to be used by said senior leadership. To say nothing of the fact that often said systems are built for the sole purpose of enabling abuse, so there's very little question about the line of moral responsibility (whether of privacy or in the aiding of censorship in authoritarian nations, et al). This obviously isn't a new debate within tech though, it goes all the way back in the industry (eg IBM's counting machines).
There's another path to not building and not participating it. It might be possible to be subversive and design these systems to best fit your values:
"My bias was always to build decentralization into the net. That way it would be hard for one group to gain control. I didn’t trust large central organizations. It was just in my nature to distrust them." -- Robert Taylor
Full Disclosure: I recently left a position with one of Accenture's subsidiary. I also hate that company.
The Supreme Court actually vacated Arthur Andersen's conviction for their actions in Enron. The SC basically said the jury instructions were too vague, and the jury could have believed that Arthur Andersen thought they did everything right and legally but still voted to convict. Arthur Andersen was never retried since there wasn't much left at that point anyway.
Arthur Andersen Accounting (or whatever they formally called themselves) and Arthur Andersen Consulting had already broken up into two different companies. They set up some weird agreement where the more profitable of the two would pay a cut of the profit difference to the other company. Consulting is always more profitable than accounting (which is why all the Big 4 have gotten back into even in the age of Sarbane-Oxley, where they can't audit a company they consult for), so Arthur Andersen consulting had to send a big-ass check to the accountants every quarter and they wanted to get out of that. The blow up of Arthur Andersen accounting presented the perfect opportunity. Arthur Andersen Consulting changed their name to Accenture to distance themselves from the Enron scandal, but it was mostly PR because they didn't have anything to do with Enron anyway.
McKinsey, however, had consultants all through Enron. I believe Skilling worked for McKinsey right out of college and threw them a ton of work. There's no way people at McKinsey didn't know what Enron was up to, but they somehow got off scot-free
The name change was in place before Enron went bankrupt, and was a condition of the settlement with Andersen Consulting. It was very fortunate timing indeed.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myt...
However, everyone who knew what was happening and the scam being run should probably have been deemed complicit
Anecdotally, this happens at all levels of accounting.
I've hired two accountants in my lifetime. Both times I was asked something along the lines of, "I can be as as clean or dirty as you want me to be. Just let me know now, before we get started."
Welcome to the non-black-and-white world of gray. That mentality goes far beyond just accounting. Anything beyond a basic measurement is open to interpretation.
Which is why an accountant who is good at figuring out what's really going on is so valuable.
An accountant who specializes in making the numbers tell the story the CEO wants them to tell is not an accountant who can tell you anything useful about the company's financials. If you just want propaganda/marketting instead of accounting I guess that's fine, so long as you don't end up going to jail for it.
That things are open to interpretation doesn't mean there's no difference between trying to figure out what's going on, and trying to spin it to what you'd like to be going on.
Like a boss whose reports only tell him what he wants to hear. I'd tell the "what story do you want them to tell" guy -- what would I pay you for if you're just going to tell me the story I already know I'd like to be true?
Of course, plenty of people do pay that guy, because they're just trying to put one over on everyone else.
In other words, don't try to pass off jokes as anecdotes.
CPAs are generally extremely conservative. And unless you are paying them immense amounts of money, they are almost always reticent to do anything even remotely risky.
After all, their license and this livelyhood is on the line.
From my experience a sizeable percentage Chartered Accountant's / CPAs are happy to do whatever they are directed to as long there is plausible deniability (and you can generally find that if you look closely (or don't look closely enough).
I don't see this as special to accountant's I see it as a function of human nature.
According to friends in the Big 4, this seems like standard practice.
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Ramalinga Raju, Satyam’s then chairman, admitted to overstating the company’s cash balance by $1bn, as well as exaggerating the company’s headcount by 13,000. “It was like riding a tiger, not knowing when to get off without being eaten,” he wrote of the growing deception. The company later admitted that the total irregularities amounted to $1.7bn.
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How these things get past auditors is beyond me.
Jordan came back with an answer that I did not expect: “Ben, I’ve gone over the law six times and there’s no way that this practice is strictly within the bounds of the law. I’m not sure how PwC justified it, but I recommend against it.”
One of the foundational reasons for the spectacular implosions of both Enron and WorldCom was the behavior of their common auditor, the ginormous accounting firm Arthur Andersen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen). Andersen was willing to certify pretty much anything these companies wanted to do as fully legal and above-board, because these were big clients and Andersen didn't want to lose them to some other accounting firm by inconveniently insisting that they keep honest books. So they were free to rip people off in all sorts of creative ways for years, protected from close scrutiny by Andersen's seal of approval.
All of which is to say that, if you represent serious cash flow and you're tempted to push the legal envelope, you probably shouldn't expect a Big Four accountant to be the one to talk you out of it.