The reason these people are so profound is specifically because they can fool a lot of people in a con over many many years.
I know very little about accounting and company financials, but I work in security, and quickly remembered how much time I spend trying to convey to people that 3rd party compliance audits are not even worth the paper they’re written on, yet people still have confidence in them.
Kind of a Gell-Mann amnesia effect I suppose.
Every financial scam or scandal you read about in the press has at some point been signed off by a reputable accounting firm. Every single one.
The unusual thing about the Enron case is that there actually was some blow-back on the accounting firm too. Business as usual is that the accountants are like teflon.
its such a hard thing to really obsorb, but in business and life, we can make "the right decision" and still fail... its tough...
"It does seem obvious that I was fooled by Walter Forbes, but so were most people. He was the Jeff Bezos of his time. He had a big-four accounting firm who signed off on their financials every 90 days. Henry Silverman (Avis, Howard Johnson's, and many other companies) believed in him, as did everyone. He had been on Sierra's board for five years. I thought I knew him well. I also thought we had structured the deal such that the software business couldn't be screwed up. And, I had so much faith that Sierra's market dominance was so strong that no one could ever screw it up. As you might imagine, I've looked back on the crash many times, and still believe I made the right move based on what I knew at the time. The problem was that I was dealing with snakes and didn't know it. MANY people lost their jobs and had their net worth wiped out. It was indeed a sad event, but I wasn't the only person fooled by CUC. Tens of thousands of people directly or indirectly were hurt by the financial scandal."
There are others, too, that are worth reading for the interested.