🚀 go-pugleaf

"RS Wood" <r...@therandymon.com> writes:
> For the edification of an outsider, who were the big 8? Who are the big 4?

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2018d.html#9 Hell is ... ?

accounting firm wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms

Big Eight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms#Big_Eight
Big Six
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms#Big_Six
Big Five
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms#Big_Five
and finally Big Four
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms#Big_Four

The Enron collapse and ensuing investigation prompted scrutiny of their
financial reporting, which was audited by Arthur Andersen. Arthur
Andersen was eventually indicted for obstruction of justice for
shredding documents related to the audit in the 2001 Enron scandal.

... snip ...

Enron Scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Enron_scandal

Note I've mentioned before working on both commercial (with RDBMS
vendors) and scientific/technical (with national labs) cluster scaleup
as part of our HA/CMP product
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_High_Availability_Cluster_Multiprocessing
past posts
http://www.garlic.com/subtopic.html#hacmp

old post mentioning Jan1992 meeting in Ellison's conference room
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

a few weeks later, IBM transfers cluster scaleup, announces as
supercomputer for technical/scientific *ONLY* and we are told that we
can't work on anything with more than four processors. A few months
later we depart IBM.

Later, two of the Oracle people (referenced at the Jan1992 meeting) have
left and are at small client/server startup responsible for something
called "commerce server". We are brought in as consultants because they
want to do payment transactions on the server, the startup had also
invented this technology they called "SSL" they want to use, the result
is now frequently called "electronic commerce". Location reference in
Mountain view
http://allthingsd.com/20100826/tonight-the-lights-go-down-on-netscapes-silicon-valley-hq/

they start undergoing rapid growth and they hire Anderson (some company
involved in enron) who brings in a bunch of programmers, they are housed
in large warehouse bldg to rear/side of the main bldg ... with cubicles
setup up. Part of the issue is that the accounting firms were running
consulting business beside the audit business ... contributing to
conflict of interests.

Note that later, rhetoric on floor of congress was that Sarbanes-Oxley
would prevent future ENRONs and guarantee that executives and auditors
did jailtime, however it required SEC to do something.

Possible because GAO didn't believe SEC was doing anything, they start
doing reports of fraudulent public company financial filings, even show
that they increase after SOX goes into effect.

ENRON posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#enron
Sarbanes-Oxley posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#sarbanes-oxley
public company fraudulent financial reporting posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#financial.reporting.fraud

still at it:

New Leak Reveals Luxembourg Tax Deals for Disney, Koch Brothers Empire
Latest "Lux Leaks" files obtained by ICIJ disclose secret tax structures
sought by "Big 4" accounting giants for brand name international
companies.
https://www.icij.org/investigations/luxembourg-leaks/

tax evasion, tax fraud, tax avoidance, tax haven posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#tax.evasion

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970