An award and a memory

I’ve been in Las Vegas this weekend, attending the AAA Public Interest, Ethics, and Sustainibility Symposium. Fortunately, I leave nothing in Vegas but memories.

In June of 2003 I presented “Preparing for a Multicultural Assignment” to the IIA International Conference in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand Hotel. I asked my dad to come along to hear me speak, and so we could spend a little time together. Maybe he would help me improve my blackjack game! As a retired Chicago fireman, he was very good at cards!

So, about 23 years ago, before I went to work for PwC, before I started to write my legacy blog re: The Auditors, before I started writing for anyone else, with the failure of Enron and the implosion of Arthur Andersen still very fresh, I spoke to internal auditors about what a great opportunity it was to work outside of the US. My experience in Latin America for KPMG/BearingPoint and JP Morgan had changed my life.

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On the last day we were killing time playing blackjack in the lobby and sadly I had not improved at all. He suggested we go to the sportsbook and find something better to do with our last $100 - the last $100 he was going to spot me, that is. I decided, in June, to bet $50 on each of the college football teams in the middle of the odds at that point for the college championship, LSU and Univ. of Washington, at 32-1.

I went home and put the paper ticket away, forgetting about it until the season heated up and lo and behold it started looking like LSU had a shot. But my Starbucks buddy, an Econ Professor and Oklahoma grad, said no way. And then they played each other on January 4, 2004 for the BCS Championship and LSU won, 21-14. But where was my ticket?

I had no idea! My dad called and wanted his cut. But first I had to find the ticket.

Finally, I had to dream on it and in my dream I saw the Mexican lacquered box on a shelf in my apartment overlooking Lincoln Park. A friend who was heading to Vegas cashed it in for me. That’s how it used to work back in the old school days.

I thought about my dad when I got to Vegas this time. I was in the neon wasteland to attend the AAA Public Interest, Ethics, and Sustainability Symposium and to accept an award.

Here are my remarks:

Thank you all so much, in particular the Accounting Exemplar Award Committee and especially Pat Kelly, who has been a long and strong supporter of my work.

It was about 15 years ago, in April of 2011, when I spoke for the first time to the Public Interest Section. I presented the luncheon keynote speech on April Fool’s Day at the AAA mid-year meeting in Chicago at the Hyatt Regency. Since then I have had the honor of speaking again for the Public Interest Section and also the Audit Section, at mid-years and annuals, as well as many other academic conferences as I started doing more research work. Last year I was lucky to have my first peer reviewed research paper published, in British Accounting Review, with my co-authors Tzachi Zach and Amy Sheneman of Ohio State and Mikhail Pevzner of Univ of Baltimore.

My speech back in 2011 was entitled, “The Future of the Accounting Profession“ and then I was on a panel discussion on Saturday afternoon, “Defining the Public Interest,” moderated by Professor Kelly.

Heady stuff! Could we have even dreamed that would be the last word on either subject?

In April of 2011, I had been writing my legacy blog re: The Auditors for about five years after leaving PwC in 2006. When I left the “PwC the Client” internal audit team, I had a total of 22 years of experience working for KPMG, PwC, in industry and for two different banks including JPMorgan in Latin America.

All that experience and then the financial crisis gave me the confidence to start writing publicly about the business of the Big 4, although anonymously at first. I was afraid of being wrong about something and never being able to go back to a firm! I wrote on the blog and then freelance here and there and then a column for Forbes called “Accounting Watchdog” and for American Banker called “Accountable”.

I chose to write about accounting and audit as an industry, a business big enough to be worthy of a beat. That was new. At that time there was only an “Accountancy” reporter at the FT. All the others treated the firms as trade pub material, not interesting to the general business reader. I like to think I helped change that by proving there was a broader audience for the stories. Now you see much more reporting on the business of the firms and also their missteps, in particular when clients screw up or fail. My tag line during the financial crisis, and still, when a company stumbles or is accused of fraud or fails is “Where was the auditor?” Sometimes it has to start with “Who is the auditor?” You’d be surprised how for a long time no one cared to check or though it was important information to anyone other than fellow accountants.

So, by the time I got up in front of the public interest section crowd in Chicago many of you had already read my critiques of the global public accounting firms and their spotty ethics and their loss of interest in their public duty. I felt that I had found my tribe, academics who were as concerned as I was, not just about the future of the accounting profession on behalf of their students but also the future of their own profession, one that was supposed to protect markets and investors.

I see Sri Ramamoorti in the crowd. Thank you for being a Founding member of my newsletter The Dig.

My last words to the assembled back in 2011 were:

When public accounting firms behave unprofessionally – break laws and compromise standards – the audit industry damages the accounting profession.

The future of the accounting profession is, for better or worse, in the hands of the accounting industry.

Since then I’ve had to write about the KPMG-PCAOB scandal — thank you for your award for our teaching case on that subject — about the test cheating scandals, about the PwC Australia and now KPMG Australia scandals as well as several auditor independence scandals at all of the Big 4. In an example of the highest betrayal of their public duty, I have tracked numerous Big 4 leaders who’ve been caught trading on confidential client information who served jail terms or were banned from the profession. Despite claims that there have been no Enrons since Sarbanes-Oxley, we’ve seen major failures auditors missed: Wirecard, Colonial Bank, FTX, Evergrande, First Brands and TriColor, and many accounting frauds where the SEC chose not to prosecute at all, to prosecute them as merely disclosure failures, and to let the auditors off the hook such as at GE, Luckin, Under Armour, Mattel, Macy’s, and three bank failures all audited by KPMG.

I started teaching, first at American University in DC when I was writing for MarketWatch and WSJ, then anytime someone asked me to visit or guest lecture, at Ohio State, at Baylor, and now at Montclair State and Cambridge. I love teaching! And I get to reuse all my writing in my syllabi, although the students can barely recall the financial crisis let alone Enron.

Sadly, fifteen years later, there is even more to write about than I could have ever have anticipated when I thought the KPMG tax shelter scandal of 2005, and the auditors’ role in the financial crisis, was the worst post-Enron that it could get. Fortunately for teaching purposes at least, there is always fresh material for accounting ethics and accounting fraud case classes.

I looked at the previous winners of this award and I am in awe of the company you have asked me to now keep. Whistleblowers like Anthony Menendez and Cynthia Cooper are the heroes I teach my students about. Lord Prem Sikka was an early supporter of mine, I met him in Chicago when he was just an esteemed scholar at Essex, not long after I started writing the re:TheAuditors blog. He and Richard Murphy at Tax JusticeNetwork wondered where I had come from, they had never seen anyone in US write so frankly but with knowledge of how the firms worked from the inside.

Steve Mintz and Paul Williams have welcomed me and encouraged me all these years to try to live up to their legacy of service. Lynn Turner and Jim Doty have been mentors and are now friends. I just quoted Lynn last week for the thousandth time it seems about the Kraken/Mazars case. That was after he spent two hours on a Sunday telling me all the stories.

Abe Briloff was my model for the kinds of columns I wanted to write when I began writing. I had the pleasure of meeting him and his daughter in New York, Egg Harbor, not long before he died. His daughter Leonore subscribes to my current newsletter, and emails often to tell me she is happy to see me carrying on his legacy.

I was in Chicago last weekend for a family wedding and told my sister and four brothers about the award. Despite being the oldest I didn’t avoid some McKenna-style ribbing. We all take after my Scottish dad in that but also pay attention to my mom’s Sicilian superstition about getting too fat-headed and therefore inviting envy. They said, “Your detractors must have retired or been worn down finally. And they figured they’d get you while you are still vertical and can speak in person.”

For your support and encouragement along the way, and for this ten minutes to reminisce a bit, I thank you very much.

Before I leave Vegas, I will be recording a video interview with Pat Kelly about his work. Stay tuned. And I’m going to stop at the sportsbook at Caesar’s Palace and put some money down on the future. I think LSU and maybe Mississippi are fun bets!

Wish me luck.

© Francine McKenna, The Digging Company LLC, 2026