McKenna travels to teach at Stanford, Berkeley, and Ohio State
It was a whirlwind trip to teach Stanford undergrads and Berkeley law students, OSU's future graduate accountants and public company directors for Stanford GSB Directors' Consortium.
No teaching at Wharton this fall means I’m free to move about the cabin, that is the country, and visit other campuses. I continue to remotely stop into sessions for those that ask — I am teaching the KPMG/PCAOB scandal case to Paul Chaney’s Vanderbilt University MAcc students on Monday — but I love going in person whenever possible.
On November 15 I’ll interview Zeke Faux, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News and a winner of the Gerald Loeb Award and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and a National Magazine Award finalist, about his book Number Go Up at the Pen & Pencil Club in Philadelphia.
You can see the event on the club calendar and register to help me know if we’ll have enough space right here.
Stanford’s Anat Admati and Maureen McNichols, dear friends and mentors in academic life, pushed up a planned spring trip to this fall given a confluence of events that made it possible to do several exciting things.
On Monday Professor Admati asked me to teach two sections of her multidisciplinary class for undergrads, Finance, Corporations and Society. We also recorded a video following up on the some of the questions raised by students for her new center, The Corporations and Society Initiative. (Will post that as soon as it becomes available.) I had not been to California teach for Anat since 2014!
Earlier in the day I presented the KPMG/PCAOB scandal case to the Stanford accounting faculty and PhD students. My focus was on the implications for the profession and for future accounting research.
The next day’s highlight was a co-presentation of “Director Oversight of Financial Reporting Quality and the Audit Engagement,” which included an in-depth look at the Mattel case with Maureen McNichols for the Stanford GSB Directors’ Consortium.
Mattel reaches into its piggy bank to pay the SEC $3.5 million
I wrote about auditing industry regulator the PCAOB’s strategic plan at the beginning of October. I quoted industry veteran Bob Conway regarding concerns the PCAOB has been focusing too much on inspections of auditor compliance with standards regarding internal control reviews and not enough on poor auditing of issuer compliance with GAAP accounting sta…
It was so nice to see old friend David Larcker, who I probably had not seen in person since Directors’ College many years ago, 2012 to be exact!
(It was in 2012 that I heard Marc Andreessen say he would not take a company public if he didn’t have to, something he started saying then, but has stopped saying when it suits his purpose.)
APRIL 26, 2012
The problem with Marc Andreessen
While Andreessen is very good at making money, then, he’s much less good at creating lasting value for the long-term shareholders of his companies. In his world, buy-and-hold public shareholders are the patsies, the people left holding the bag when the fast money has long since departed. He’s smart; the rest of us are chumps. I guess it makes perfect sense that he’s recruited Larry Summers as a Special Advisor.
On Tuesday evening I drove to Berkeley, across the big Bay Bridge, to have dinner with law professor Andrew Baker, whom I had only known via Twitter until then. Andrew and Delia Violante, Associate Director - Berkeley Center for Law and Business, threw a sweet dinner for me at the faculty club with students and old friend Evan Epstein.
I first met Evan via Rock Center when it used to do an accounting for journalists program in New York! Evan has interviewed me in the past for his Boardroom Governance podcast.
McKenna does podcasts
Podcasts are a neat format that allows me, in most cases, to have a conversation, rather than give a lecture on the issues I write frequently about. I’ve shied away from producing my own because, well, life is just too short for one more thing. But I do very much enjoy being asked to join others.
The next day I spoke to Professor Baker’s students after we dissected all the issues in accounting research over coffee at
Andrew’s students were very interested in the multiple cases of insider trading among audit firm partners, including firm leaders like Scott London and Tom Flanagan. Andrew and I helped the students put them into the three theories of insider trading: (1) the classical or traditional theory, (2) misappropriation theory, and (3) tipper/tippee liability.
We also had fun talking about how hard or easy it is to take auditors to court for 10b5 fraud, the impact of PSLRA, and how some attorneys have made a dent in the auditors’ armor in cases brought by a Trustee after bankruptcy.
We also talked about the big record damages in the case of FDIC v. PwC for Colonial Bank and how the FDIC may become more active in pursuing auditors since they’ve given the FDIC so much to work with lately.
Part 1: Where was KPMG while Silicon Valley Bank, and the rest, were teetering?
When Silicon Valley Bank was teetering — in March 2023 the very large "regional" bank was obliterated after a massive deposit run in the space of a week — I thought about writing about how its external auditor, KPMG, is the #1 auditor to banks. I waited instead and was rewarded with not one, not two, but three banks audited by KPMG that went under in short order and another PacWest, that is still going but too much in the news for wrong reasons.
I took a redeye from the west coast on Wed and then turned around to head to Ohio Friday morning to present to Professor Tzachi Tzach’s MAccs at Ohio State. As always OSU has some of the sharpest students around and several of them connected with me to follow-up for future guidance on ways to use their tools outside of the Big 4.
All in all it was a great trip! Some student slidedecks are behind the paywall. So please subscribe!
© Francine McKenna, The Digging Company LLC, 2023