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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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The long sleep of capitalism’s watchdogs

There are only five more days left in my Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

One of the weirdest aspect of end-stage capitalism is the collapse of auditing, the lynchpin of investing. Auditors – independent professionals who sign off on a company's finances – are the only way that investors can be sure they're not handing their money over to failing businesses run by crooks.

It's just not feasible for investors to talk to supply-chain partners and retailers and verify that a company's orders and costs are real. Investors can't walk into a company's bank and demand to see their account histories. Auditors – who are paid by companies, but work for themselves – are how investors avoid shoveling money into Ponzi-pits.

Attentive readers will have noticed that there is an intrinsic tension in an arrangement where someone is paid by a company to certify its honesty. The company gets to decide who its auditors are, and those auditors are dependent on the company for future business. To manage this conflict of interest, auditors swear fealty to a professional code of ethics, and are themselves overseen by professional boards with the power to issue fines and ban cheaters.

Enter monopolization. Over the past 40 years, the US government conducted a failed experiment in allowing companies to form monopolies on the theory that these would be "efficient." From Boeing to Facebook, Cigna to InBev, Warner to Microsoft, it has been a catastrophe. The American corporate landscape is dominated by vast, crumbling, ghastly companies whose bad products and worse corporate conduct are locked in a race to see who can attain the most depraved enshittification quickest.

The accounting profession is no exception. A decades-long incestuous orgy of mergers and acquisitions yielded up an accounting sector dominated by just four firms: EY, KPMG, PWC and Deloitte (the last holdout from the alphabetsoupification of corporate identity). Virtually every major company relies on one of these companies for auditing, but that's only a small part of corporate America's relationship with these tottering behemoths. The real action comes from "consulting."

Each of the Big Four accounting firms is also a corporate consultancy. Some of those consulting services are the normal work of corporate consultants – cookie cutter advice to fire workers and reduce product quality, as well as supplying dangerously defecting enterprise software. But you can get that from the overpaid enablers at McKinsey or BCG. The advantage of contracting with a Big Four accounting firm for consulting is that they can help you commit finance fraud.

Remember: if you're an executive greenlighting fraud, you mostly just want to be sure it's not discovered until after you've pocketed your bonus and moved on. After all, the pro-monopoly experiment was also an experiment in tolerating corporate crime. Executives who cheat their investors, workers and suppliers typically generate fines for their companies, while escaping any personal liability.

By buying your cheating advice from the same company that is paid to certify that you're not cheating, you greatly improve your chances of avoiding detection until you've blown town.

Which brings me to the idea of the "bezzle." This is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the weeks, months, or years that elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery." This is the period in which both the criminal and the victim feel like they're better off. The crook has the victim's money, and the victim doesn't know it. The Bezzle is that interval when you're still assuming that FTX isn't lying to you about the crazy returns they're generating for your crypto. It's the period between you getting the shrinkwrapped box with a 90% discounted PS5 in it from a guy in an alley, and getting home and discovering that it's full of bricks and styrofoam.

Big Accounting is a factory for producing bezzles at scale. The game is rigged, and they are the riggers. When banks fail and need a public bailout, chances are those banks were recently certified as healthy by one of the Big Four, whose audited bank financials failed 800 re-audits between 2009-17:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#aligned-incentives

The Big Four dispute this, of course. They claim to be models of probity, adhering to the strictest possible ethical standards. This would be a lot easier to believe if KPMG hadn't been caught bribing its regulators to help its staff cheat on ethics exams:

https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-professional/article/sec-probe-finds-kpmg-auditors-cheating-on-training-exams-061819

Likewise, it would be easier to believe if their consulting arms didn't keep getting caught advising their clients on how to cheat their auditing arms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/09/dingo-babysitter/#maybe-the-dingos-ate-your-nan

Big Accounting is a very weird phenomenon, even by the standards of End-Stage Capitalism. It's an organized system of millionaire-on-billionaire violence, a rare instance of the very richest people getting scammed the hardest:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#crooked-ref

The collapse of accounting is such an ominous and fractally weird phenomenon, it inspired me to write a series of hard-boiled forensic accountancy novels about a two-fisted auditor named Martin Hench, starting with last year's Red Team Blues (out in paperback next week!):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865854/redteamblues

The sequel to Red Team Blues is called (what else?) The Bezzle, and part of its ice-cold revenge plot involves a disillusioned EY auditor who can't bear to be part of the scam any longer:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-bezzle-a-martin-hench-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell

The Hench stories span a 40-year period, and are a chronicle of decades of corporate decay. Accountancy is the perfect lens for understanding our modern fraud economy. After all, it was crooked accountants who gave us the S&L crisis:

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10130&context=etd

Crooked auditors were at the center of the Great Financial Crisis, too:

https://francinemckenna.com/2009/12/07/they-werent-there-auditors-and-the-financial-crisis/

And of course, crooked auditors were behind the Enron fraud, a rare instance in which a fraud triggered a serious attempt to prevent future crimes, including the destruction of accounting giant Arthur Andersen. After Enron, Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), which created a new oversight board called the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).

The PCAOB is a watchdog for watchdogs, charged with auditing the auditors and punishing the incompetent and corrupt among them. Writing for The American Prospect and the Revolving Door Project, Timi Iwayemi describes the long-running failure of the PCAOB to do its job:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-01-26-corporate-self-oversight/

For example: from 2003-2019, the PCAOB undertook only 18 enforcement cases – even though the PCAOB also detected more than 800 "seriously defective audits" by the Big Four. And those 18 cases were purely ornamental: the PCAOB issued a mere $6.5m in fines for all 18, even though they could have fined the accounting companies $1.6 billion:

https://www.pogo.org/investigations/how-an-agency-youve-never-heard-of-is-leaving-the-economy-at-risk

Few people are better on this subject than the investigative journalist Francine McKenna, who has just co-authored a major paper on the PCAOB:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4227295

The paper uses a new data set – documents disclosed in a 2019 criminal trial – to identify the structural forces that cause the PCAOB to be such a weak watchdog whose employees didn't merely fail to do their jobs, but actually criminally abetted the misdeeds of the companies they were supposed to be keeping honest.

They put the blame – indirectly – on the SEC. The PCAOB has three missions: protecting investors, keeping markets running smoothly, and ensuring that businesses can raise capital. These missions come into conflict. For example, declaring one of the Big Four auditors ineligible would throw markets into chaos, removing a quarter of the auditing capacity that all public firms rely on. The Big Four are the auditors for 99.7% of the S&P 500, and certify the books for the majority of all listed companies:

https://blog.auditanalytics.com/audit-fee-trends-of-sp-500/

For the first two decades of the PCAOB's existence, the SEC insisted that conflicts be resolved in ways that let the auditing firms commit fraud, because the alternative would be bad for the market.

So: rather than cultivating an adversarial relationship to the Big Four, the PCAOB effectively merged with them. Two of its board seats are reserved for accountants, and those two seats have been occupied by Big Four veterans almost without exception:

https://www.pogo.org/investigations/captured-financial-regulator-at-risk

It was no better on the SEC side. The Office of the Chief Accountant is the SEC's overseer for the PCAOB, and it, too, has operated with a revolving door between the Big Four and their watchdog (indeed, the Chief Accountant is the watchdog for the watchdog for the watchdogs!). Meanwhile, staffers from the Office of the Chief Accountant routinely rotated out of government service and into the Big Four.

This corrupt arrangement reached a crescendo in 2019, with the appointment of William Duhnke – formerly of Senator Richard Shelby's [R-AL] staff – took over as Chief Accountant. Under Duhnke's leadership, the already-toothless watchdog was first neutered, then euthanized. Duhnke fired all four heads of the PCAOB's main division and then left their seats vacant for 18 months. He slashed the agency's budget, "weakened inspection requirements and auditor independence policies, and disregarded obligations to hold Board meetings and publicize its agenda."

All that ended in 2021, when SEC chair Gary Gensler fired Duhnke and replaced him with Erica Williams, at the insistence of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Within a year, Williams had issued 42 enforcement actions, the largest number since 2017, levying over $11m in sanctions:

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2023/01/pcaob-sets-aggressive-agenda-for-2023-what-to-expect-as-agency-enforcement-expands

She was just getting warmed up: last year, PCAOB collected $20m in fines, with five cases seeing fines in excess of $2m each, a record:

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/01/pcaobs-enforcement-and-standard-setting-rev-up-what-to-expect-in-2024

Williams isn't shy about condemning the Big Four, publicly sounding the alarm that 40% of the 2022 audits the PCAOB reviewed were deficient, up from 34% in 2021 and 29% in 2020:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-audit-the-auditors-and-we-found-trouble-accountability-capital-markets-c5587f05

Under Williams, the PCAOB has enacted new, muscular rules on lead auditors' duties, and they're now consulting on a rule that will make audit inspections much faster, shortening the documentation period from 45 days to 14:

https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/pcaob-rulemaking-could-lead-to-more-timely-issuance-of-audit-inspection-reports/

Williams is no fire-breathing leftist. She's an alum of the SEC and a BigLaw firm, creating modest, obvious technical improvements to a key system that capitalism requires for its orderly functioning. Moreover, she is competent, able to craft regulations that are effective and enforceable. This has been a motif within the Biden administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

But though these improvements are decidedly moderate, they are grounded in a truly radical break from business-as-usual in the age of monopoly auditors. It's a transition from self-regulation to regulation. As @40_Years on Twitter so aptly put it: "Self regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance":

https://twitter.com/40_Years/status/1750025605465178260

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28 - THIS SUNDAY!) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/26/noclar-war/#millionaire-on-billionaire-violence

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/

Disco Dan (modified)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/danhogbenspics/8318883471/

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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govchegbooks · 2 days

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todaynewsonline · 2 months

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Inventory Management Software for Small Businesses

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managedserversus · 10 months

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loser-female · 4 months

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I'm perfectly aware that the place to put this post is linkedin and not Tumblr.com (although i might make a more professional-looking version).

Anyway, I'm horrified by the amount of cyber attacks that are happening in the last few days. Especially because a couple of these are really big companies, and one would think they have an IT department that knows how to do their job. Even better, they should have at least one person that deals with cybersecurity.

I know that security operations centers (where we use very expensive systems to monitor the networks and the assets of the companies, plus we often investigate previous security incidents and produce intelligence reports) are expensive. I work in one and it's not the solution that works for everyone. A small company with few employees definitely cannot afford a SOC, but a big corporation? That would be nice (again, it's not the only solution and every client is different, you need to tailor the cybersecurity solution to the client).

But a videogame studio? I would expect them to take security seriously. And not only because of the data involved, but industrial espionage is a thing (although it's difficult to prove and it happens rarely that it's taken to a court, however it does happen), but it's a risk. A worldwide clothing company? A fucking bank? Sure.

The problem with certain things it's that "it won't happen to me". Until it does. And you end up paying 300x than you would be paying at least a cybersecurity consultant to prevent the attack.

Even better, a lot of the simplest measures are free to implement. No USB from home policy. Disabling local administrator accounts. Implement a strong password policy. Implement a blacklist for suspicious websites (and also, maybe stop downloading cracked software if you don't know where to find reputable sources? I see you trying to download that CoD aimbot, how embarrassing)

Implement a strong antispam policy (which is fundamental, as this is very very often the access point - you send a targeted spam email to a company with 3k employees and I can guarantee you that at least one will download the malicious file or insert the credential on the fake office 365 website, it's just what it is.)

But most people won't, because "it's annoying" and users don't want to put the effort to like, keep their fucking job and remember a 12 character password(yes, a company can suffer so much damage from a cyber attacks that it might even close the business, and yes, I had to fight with clients that refuse to change their AD admin accounts set in 2015 even when I told them about a potential leak) Not to mention that the data stolen often is the employees data. And you don't want your identity stolen by a criminal, do you?

And the danger when these attacks are carried against hospitals. People can die if the whole network shuts down because no one cared to implement basic cybersecurity.

And it's not true that organisations don't have the budget. We both know you are lying lol.

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing foolproof, there will always be a certain amount of risk.

I just expect people to use some good sense and I'm often disappointed lol.

#ada.txt #cybersecurity

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investmentassistant · 8 months

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Overview of WL COMPANY DMCC financial marketplace

The company we want to talk about today is called WL COMPANY DMCC. WL Company DMCC (License Number DMCC-89711, Registration Number DMCC19716, Account Number 411911), registered in Dubai, UAE whose registered office is Unit No BA95, DMCC Business Centre, Level No 1, represented by the Director, Stephanie Sandilands.

DMCC is the largest free trade zone in the United Arab Emirates, which is located in Dubai. It was established in 2002 and now serves as a commodity exchange that operates in four sectors: precious goods; energy; steel and metals; agricultural products.

Main services and activities

WL COMPANY DMCC is a financial marketplace, the direction of which is financial services, consulting, management, analysis of services, provision of services by third parties to the end user. The list also includes:

• Investment ideas;

• Active product trading;

• Analytical support for traders;

• Selection of an investment strategy in the market using various assets.

WL COMPANY DMCC operates on the MetaTrader 5 trading platform. There is a convenient registration, detailed instructions, as well as the ability to connect a demo account for self-study.

Among the main services:

1. Trading.

2. Social Services.

3.ESG Investment.

4. Analytics.

5. Wealth management.

Company managers will help with registration, with opening an account, with access to the platform. After training (if required), you can make a minimum deposit of 500 USD and start trading.

Main advantages and disadvantages of WL COMPANY DMCC

Before going directly to the benefits of the marketplace, it is worth saying a few words about the loyalty program. Depending on the amount of investment, the user receives one of three grades. Each of them gives certain privileges. The program itself makes it possible to get the maximum effect from investments in a short time.

Now about the benefits of WL COMPANY DMCC:

1. Availability of a license in the jurisdiction of the DMCC trading zone.

2. No commission when making SFD transactions on shares.

3. More than 6700 trading instruments.

4. High professional level of support.

5. Very strong analytical support (client confidence level 87%).

6. Weekly comments and summaries from WL COMPANY experts.

7. Modern analysis software.

8. Large selection of investment solutions.

9. Own exclusive market analysis services in various areas.

10. Own analytical department with the publication of materials in the public domain.

11. Modern focus on social services.

The feedback from WL COMPANY DMCC clients highlights the positive characteristics of the work of marketplace analysts, the convenience of a personal account, the speed of processing positions, analysis tools, and low commissions.

Negative reviews relate to the freezing of the system, delays in withdrawing funds for a day, and the small age of the company. Also, for some users, the application for withdrawal of funds was not processed the first time, and someone could not instantly replenish the deposit. North American traders complain that WL COMPANY DMCC only has a presence in Dubai.

At the same time, the financial group received several significant awards:

• Best MetaTrader 5 Broker 2022

• The Most Reliable Fintech Service 2023

Outcome

According to the information received, it can be concluded that WL COMPANY DMCC can be called a good financial marketplace in the modern market. By registering with the DMCC, the company can be called reliable and trustworthy. There are also negative reviews, but they relate mainly to the technical component.

For August, 2023 WL COMPANY DMCC has about 12000 clients worldwide. The main regions are North America, Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Traders can act independently or use the advice of marketplace experts.

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