Corrupt Watchdogs

At first glance it seemed to be a satirical piece from The Onion. The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a press release announcing that Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young was being fined $100 million for failing to prevent its audit professionals from cheating on ethics exams required to obtain and maintain their CPA licenses.

Not only did EY exercise poor oversight over its employees—it also tried to withhold evidence of the misconduct from agency investigators. This prompted the SEC to impose the largest fine ever against an audit firm.

The SEC’s release quoted Enforcement Division Director Gurbir Grewal as saying “it’s simply outrageous that the very professionals responsible for catching cheating by clients cheated on ethics exams, of all things,” adding: “And it’s equally shocking that Ernst & Young hindered our investigation of this misconduct.”

Yes, it’s shocking, shocking in a Casablanca sort of way to learn that EY management is apparently as corrupt as its auditors. The SEC failed to mention that EY has a long track record of misconduct. Even before this latest case, it has racked up more than $350 million in fines and settlements since 2000, as documented in Violation Tracker.

In 2013, for instance, EY paid $123 million to resolve allegations that it promoted a tax shelter scheme to clients that was so dodgy that the IRS asked the Justice Department to bring criminal charges against the firm. In 2009 EY paid $109 million to the Michigan Attorney General to settle allegations that it failed to expose accounting fraud in its audits of HealthSouth Corporation.

The SEC itself fined EY eight previous times in the past two decades, including a case last year in which the firm paid $10 million to settle allegations it violated auditor independence rules.

EY is not the only member of the Big Four with a checkered record—they are all tainted. As shown in Violation Tracker, PricewaterhouseCoopers has accumulated $114 million in penalties, Deloitte has $260 million and KPMG a whopping $560 million.

A big portion of the KPMG total came from a 2005 case in which it paid $456 million to resolve criminal charges that it designed and marketed fraudulent tax shelters. It has paid penalties to the SEC nine times since 2000—including a $50 million fine involving the same kind of cheating found at EY.

Given the ineffective deterrent effects of monetary penalties and criminal charges resolved through non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements, one might ask whether there is any way to eliminate corruption among the big auditing firms.

The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act created a federal entity called the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which is supposed to keep auditing firms on the straight and narrow. It has brought more than 100 cases against the Big Four and smaller firms, yet auditing scandals continue to happen.

There is a need to find ways to end the stranglehold the Big Four have on providing auditing services for large corporations. This could include reforms such as stricter requirements for companies to rotate the firms they use. New reforms adopted in the UK will require large corporations to use smaller firms for at least a portion of their auditing.

A bolder approach could involve the creation of non-profit auditing agencies with more rigorous independence rules to prevent them from being influenced by unscrupulous clients. These and other reforms are urgently needed to end a system in which auditors who are supposed to ferret out corruption instead end up facilitating it.

Note: Just before the EY case was announced, Violation Tracker posted its latest quarterly update with about 10,000 new federal, state and local regulatory enforcement actions and class action lawsuits. This brought the total number of entries to 522,000 and total penalties to $804 billion. The EY case will be added soon.

The Not-So-Woke Corporations

In its never-ending effort to use culture war issues for political advantage, the American Right has a new favorite target: woke corporations. This is the derogatory term conservatives have seized on to attack those portions of Big Business that have decided to show concern about issues such as racism, sexism and inequality.

This is one of those debates with a lot of empty posturing on both sides. Corporatist Republicans are pretending to be fire-breathing critics of the Fortune 500. Chief executives who are still preoccupied with profit above all are pretending to be social reformers.

Since behavior counts more than public statements, let’s look at the track record of large corporations when it comes to the issue at the center of wokeness: their treatment of women and people of color. One has only to look at some of the cases in the news over the past couple of months to get an indication of what really goes on in the business world.

Recently, for example, Google agreed to pay $118 million to settle litigation that accused it of systematically underpaying its female employees. The lawsuit, originally filed in 2017, alleged that the company put women into lower career tracks than their male counterparts, resulting in lower salaries and bonuses. Once a judge granted class action status to the plaintiffs—something that some similar suits against tech companies failed to achieve–it was almost inevitable that the company was going to have to make a substantial payout.

This case is not the only instance of discrimination allegations against Google. In 2021 a branch of the U.S. Labor Department found evidence of compensation and hiring discrimination against female and Asian applicants for engineering positions. Google had to pay out $2.5 million in back pay and set aside $1.25 million for pay-equity adjustments. The company is also defending itself against a lawsuit accusing it of racial discrimination.

In another major discrimination case, Sterling Jewelers recently agreed to pay out $175 million to settle a long-running lawsuit accusing it of underpaying and underpromoting tens of thousands of women at its stores. There were also accusations of sexual harassment at the company.

Not long ago, a federal court approved a consent decree entered into by the gaming giant Activision Blizzard to resolve an action brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in response to reports of sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and related retaliation at the company. The company is paying out $18 million.

Activision is being acquired by Microsoft, which has had its own discrimination issues. In May, the same Labor Department agency that fined Google required Microsoft subsidiary LinkedIn to provide $1.8 million in back pay and interest to a group of nearly 700 female employees said to have been the victims of gender-based pay discrimination.

As I documented in a 2019 report, almost all large corporations have been caught up in discrimination cases. While many of the cases are resolved through confidential settlements, I was able to show that 189 Fortune 500 companies had paid a total of $1.9 billion to resolve private litigation or cases brought by federal government agencies since 2000.

There is no indication that the policies that gave rise to those cases have come to an end. In fact, the main problem with woke corporations seems to be that they are not woke enough.

ESG Besieged

Things have been rough lately for those high-minded asset management services promoting ESG investment practices. The Right is dragging ethical investment into its culture war, accusing the ESG world of promoting “woke capitalism.” In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, former Vice President Mike Pence went so far as to state that “the next Republican president and GOP Congress should work to end the use of ESG principles nationwide.”

Unfortunately, the ESG world has left itself vulnerable to such attacks. Its criteria for deciding which corporations deserve a seal of approval are often less than rigorous and may be based on unverified data produced by the companies themselves.

The problems of ESG have reached the point that the Securities and Exchange Commission recently proposed rules that would impose stricter disclosure standards on ethical investment funds and require them to meet somewhat stricter criteria in order to use ESG or related terms in the name of the fund.

Yet perhaps the biggest embarrassment for the ESG world just occurred in Germany, where dozens of agents from the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office and the financial regulatory agency BaFin raided the offices of Deutsche Bank and its asset management subsidiary DWS. In the wake of that action, the chief executive of DWS resigned.

The investigators were reported to be seeking evidence that DWS defrauded clients by exaggerating the extent to which its green investment products were actually based on sustainable practices. In other words, the Deutsche Bank subsidiary appears to be under criminal investigation for engaging in greenwashing. The case is said to be related to a probe that the SEC has reportedly been conducting of the matter—though without any dramatic raids.

Without pre-judging the outcome of the investigation, I find it difficult to believe that DWS is innocent. After all, it is part of a corporation with a long history of engaging in misconduct. As shown in Violation Tracker, it has racked up more than $18 billion in fines and settlements for cases involving the sale of toxic securities, manipulation of interest rate benchmarks, promotion of fraudulent tax shelters, violations of anti-money-laundering laws, foreign bribery, and more. This is all on top of Deutsche Bank’s questionable business dealings with Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

I’ve always found it odd that a bank with a reputation such as this could put itself forth as a practitioner of ethical investing. Yet that is a big part of the problem with ESG. Rap sheets such as that of Deutsche Bank are often ignored, and companies are deemed worthy based on some specific practice that is far from representative of its overall behavior.

The Deutsche Bank case is not the only example of an ESG investment adviser being held to account. Recently, the SEC charged BNY Mellon Investment Adviser for misstatements and omissions concerning the ESG criteria used in some of its mutual funds. The company agreed to pay $1.5 million to resolve the matter.

Cases such as these signal that the ethical investing world is going to have to get a lot more ethical—and rigorous—if it is going to survive.