Francine McKenna is an independent journalist who authors the newsletter, The Dig, covering accounting, audit and corporate governance issues at public and pre-IPO companies. She was previously the Transparency reporter at MarketWatch, a leading online financial news outlet published by Dow Jones & Co., where she covered financial regulation and legislation beginning in 2015. Her work has been featured frequently in The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s; 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 previously authored regular columns on corporate accounting issues for Forbes and on the intersection of financial services and professional services for American Banker. McKenna was a Journalist in Residence at the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2017. McKenna is an adjunct professor in international business in the MBA program at American University’s Kogod School of Business. Her perspective as an financial journalist and commentator is informed by more than 25 years of experience in executive roles in professional services, financial services, and manufacturing firms. 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. Prior to transitioning to journalism beginning in 2006, 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 March 2018, Tesla’s Board of Directors granted Musk a potential bonus of 20,264,042 stock option awards under a plan that uses “adjusted EBITDA” as one of its metrics. According to general accounting principles, Tesla recorded a 2019 net loss of $862 million, but thanks to using different accounting principles this loss became an adjusted EBITDA profit of $2.985 billion.
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Is the PCAOB really investigating PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for its role in the Mattel auditing mess? I may be wrong, but I seriously doubt it. Since the PCAOB and the SEC are captured by the Big Four auditing firms, regulators use the same PR tactics to preserve their own—and the audit firms’— survival.
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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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