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No one is per­fect. We all make mis­takes, noth­ing new about that con­cept. Cor­po­ra­tions make mis­takes (New Coke any­one?) but they don’t make them very often, or at least they used to not make them very often. One of the rea­sons that cor­po­ra­tions used to make fewer mis­takes was because there were mul­ti­ple peo­ple doing things and errors tended to get caught or at worst aver­aged in. Of course, that assumed that on the whole, peo­ple didn’t want to do bad work and didn’t want oth­ers to do it either. Ha ha, anti­quated think­ing, eh? Because now we have com­pa­nies like World­Com which announced $3.8B in account­ing errors and will be, among other things, lay­ing off 17,000 employees.

Com­pa­nies like World­Com have cre­ated a new cor­po­rate cul­ture where thiev­ery and deceit are the norm and noth­ing is more impor­tant than telling Wall Street good news. No one raises their hand and no one tries to change things. Audi­tors are hired by the account­ing firms they will be audit­ing and just con­tinue the false­hoods because no smart com­pany bites the hand that feeds it.

Ask your­self this ques­tion: “Who is look­ing out for the peo­ple (investors, employ­ees, etc.)?” You might not like the answer.

This work, unless oth­er­wise expressly stated, is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.