PCAOB hands PwC 10th birthday present

PricewaterhouseCoopers has been handed another tenth birthday present – a
damning report from US regulator the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

The PCAOB’s latest report into the firm highlights ‘deficiencies’ in some of
the PwC audits it reviewed.

Several audits involved a failure to check rigorously companies’ fair value
assumptions.

On one audit, PwC failed to check whether some ‘accounts receivable’, or
debts a company was owed, existed and whether they were correctly valued.

In another, PwC allowed a company to record its monthly revenues on a cash
basis because it was worried it might not collect the revenues, without testing
whether the company’s policy of doing so was a good one.

PwC is celebrating its tenth anniversary this week. Price Waterhouse and
Coopers and Lybrand merged on 1 July 1998.

The anniversary has also been marked by
the
comments of Paul Boyle, the chief executive of the FRC, who suggested that
regulators giving the merger the green light had been ‘unfortunate’.

‘With hindsight, it’s unfortunate that the merger was allowed to go ahead,
because it has left us in a more risky position than we otherwise would have
been.’

The firm has announced a charity project to mark the anniversary, and the UK
firm yesterday announced the appointment of 80 new partners.

Further Reading:

Read
the PCAOB report

Boyle
brands PwC merger ‘unfortunate’

PwC
10-year anniversary special report