Xerox Restates 5 Years of Revenue

You know ... you wonder what exactly is happening with the auditing and accounting profession today. Xerox itself is primarily to blame, of course, for shifting numbers around the way it did. But what on earth was KPMG doing to allow any such thing? As an auditor, it was thier public duty to not only to tell Xerox that what they were doing was wrong, but to report such problems to the SEC and other oversight agencies. I mean, if PricewaterhouseCoopers (no ethical giant itself) was able to find the errors by simply going through statements that KPMG had already audited and certified, then how difficult could it have been to find the errors in the first place?

It's becoming quite clear that there's something rotten in the auditing/accounting/consulting profession. Andersen and Enron and all their other failing clients (including WorldCom, oh yes) may well just be the worst of it all. To be sure, at least KPMG's dereliction of duty didn't make Xerox fail. (And wouldn't that have been a fun thing to watch.) But enough companies, aside from Xerox, have been restating earnings over the past few months to show that the profession has been letting money get the better of its principles.