Francine McKenna is the Transparency reporter at MarketWatch, a leading online financial news outlet published by Dow Jones & Co., where she covers financial regulation and legislation. Her work is featured frequently in The Wall Street Journal; her reporting and commentary have also been featured in the Financial Times, Accountancy Age, Accountancy Magazine, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business Chicago Booth Review magazine, and various other financial, media, and technology publications. She is currently on a spring quarter sabbatical from MarketWatch, participating in a Journalist in Residence fellowship at the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. McKenna also teaches a course in international business as an adjunct professor for the MBA program at American University’s Kogod School of Business. McKenna's perspective as a financial journalist is informed by more than 25 years of experience in executive roles in professional services, financial services, and manufacturing firms. Prior to becoming a journalist, McKenna was a director in PwC’s internal audit and governance advisory services group, where she audited PwC’s post-Sarbanes-Oxley response to heightened compliance and regulatory scrutiny. Before that, she was regional vice president for the Midwest at Jefferson Wells (a subsidiary of Manpower); led the industrial, automotive, and transportation practice as BearingPoint’s (formerly KPMG Consulting) first female managing director in Latin America; and directed the Y2K project management office for JPMorgan Chase’s Latin America operations. In 2006, McKenna created the blog re: The Auditors to explore in an independent, objective, and often critical way the role, responsibility, and regulation of the audit and accounting industry in the global capital markets, and in particular, the business of the Big Four audit firms.
The failure of Enron and subsequent demise of Arthur Andersen led to significant changes for public reporting and auditing but not much change in the concentration of audit market power among the remaining Big Four global firms: Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PwC.
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PwC took over as auditor of the corruption-plagued global football body last year, with the intention of reforming it. So how is it that PwC is now accused of allegedly covering up a misappropriation of funds by FIFA’s new secretary general?
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A look at the Big Four’s congressional lobbying activity shows the auditors and their trade association taking advantage of the “Trump” window to roll back the 2002 reforms that changed their business.
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