When there’s a failure the audit firm and the lead partner are often sued. Lately, it seems, the audit firm may be sued but the partner responsible is not named in the suit. The only time the public sees the name of the partner for a failed company or an audit failure is in a lawsuit or an action by the SEC or PCAOB against the person. Duncan ended up in civil and criminal litigation so there was no question we would know. PwC has not yet been named in all MF Global suits and the partner has not been named in any of the ones PwC is already a defendant in. Therefore, open secret.

Many critics of audit partner name transparency (has nothing to do with signing or not signing the audit report) say if you want to know the partner name go to the annual meeting. That doesn’t help the potential or former investor and that doesn’t help the public as a whole. No one can track the career history of active audit partners and the ones who end up in industry or the government, including their disciplinary or litigation history, by trying to figure out one by one only the current lead partner of public companies. I believe there should be a registry of all key partners on each public client and that their disciplinary and litigation history should also be included as well as education and all licensing credentials. This would include lead, concurring, tax, advisory, specialty and any business unit leads like McGowan was for broker-dealers. We should be able to look up a name and see their who history. You should be able to look up a pubic company and see all the partners form the firm that have been involved so you can track rotation history and fees relationships especially for tax and other consulting.

We should be abel to see if partners who escaped or were dropped from being named individually in failures – because the partner and the audit firm cooperated with plaintiffs or regulators to make a stronger case against executives or board members – have nine lives.

Honest questions. not trying to be obnoxious.

Thanks for that insight. Smaller cities and smaller firms with industry niches value prior experience more than the Big Four who want to replicate the collegiate experience for new grads.

Also, she was not the lead partner on some of the larger clients like Goldman Sachs but the partner on the broker-dealer audit. ( I know who lead partners have been on other FS clients like GS and JPM and AIG, for example.) There is no rotation requirement there. Partner rotation is only post Sarbanes, 2003 or so, and we’ve seen with Skechers that partners are rolling off and rolling back on. They can also retain another partner role on the client other than lead indefinitely as long as its not concurring. Auditing only the broker-dealer is not constrained under rotation. I don’t find the Barings situation as odd as I do the use of the term partner throughout but that can possibly be written off as ego and lack of willingness/ernergy to document full career track. The first engagement is not labeled as partner role, DBL, but I can imagine she may have been promoted to partner while working at CCMC.

I agree with you it is terribly sloppy. I have not yet bought into it completely as authentic for that reason, meaning it is her creation, but I am not sure the info is necessarily fake. The point of the article is that very few people know the detailed dates and places of a Big Four partner’s career. And if it was not hers, why wouldn’t she and PwC have it deleted as a fake rather than edited? Why would a faker edit it?

It is a highly caveatted source. And I have had no one in a week, including her and PwC, refute her lead of MF Global and involvement in Madoff feeder funds (that would be pretty much impossible.) No one has refuted any other facts of the LinkedIn profile either. MF Global and the Madoff connection are, to me, the most important and are enough to raise questions. I posted the LinkedIn profile to see if I could get some corrections or changes or someone to admit or deny the facts. There’s a method…