These are the words that will lead us into a new world. Who knows, maybe, this one time, they're telling the truth? After all, the company whose employees gather to sing lyrics like these can't be all bad, right? Like, they denied creating "power maps" of decision-makers in the Australian government to target with influence campaigns in order to win contracts like this one. It was this colossal fuckup that led to the manifestly unfit Singaporean company getting nearly half a billion dollars in public funds: The Paladin that KPMG audited was a totally different company, based in Papua New Guinea, who already had a commercial relationship with KPMG. The Paladin that the Australia government paid KPMG to audit was based in Singapore. Paladin made AU423 million on this contract.Īnd here's the scandal: KPMG audited the wrong company. The Australian government hired KPMG to audit Paladin, a security contractor that oversees the asylum seekers the country locks up on one of its island gulags (yes, gulags, plural).Įver since, Paladin has been the subject of a string of ghastly human rights scandals – the worst stuff imaginable, rape and torture and murder of adults and children. I included it as a plot-point in my new finance crime novel The Bezzle (now a national bestseller!), and multiple readers have written to me since the book came out a couple weeks ago to say that they thought I was straining their credulity by making up such an outrageous scandal:īut all of that is just scene-setting (and a gratuitous plug for my book) for the latest KPMG scandal, which is, possibly, the most KPMG scandal of all KPMG scandals. I mean it when I say this is stranger than fiction. The corrupt officials were then given high-paid jobs at KPMG: The company bribed SEC personnel help its own accountants cheat on ethics exams. KPMG's most bizarre scandal is literally stranger than fiction. They're the architects of Microsoft's tax-evasion plot:Īnd they were behind Canada's dysfunctional covid contact-tracing app, which never worked, but generated tens of millions in billings to the government of Canada, who used KPMG to hire programmers at $1,500/day, plus KPMG's 30% commission: To killer nursing homes that hire KPMG to audit its books – and to advise it on how to defeat safety audits and murder your grandma: Nearly every accounting scandal of the past quarter-century has KPMG in it somewhere, from con-artists selling exhausted oil fields to rubes: Now all this is objectively very funny, a relic of the old, good internet from one of its moments of glory, but KPMG? They were already enshittifying, even in 2001, and the enshittification only intensified thereafter. The actual link was to KPMG's corporate anthem, which remains, to this day, a banger:ĭon't miss the DJ remixes (and the Nokia ringtone!) that the internet thoughtfully provided when KPMG decided that it didn't want the world to know about "Our Vision of Global Strategy": They first came on my radar in 2001 when they sent a legal threat to a blogger for linking to their website without permission: KPMG has a well-deserved reputation for incompetence and corruption. Let's start with the latest incredible news from KPMG, the accounting and auditing giant that is relied upon as a source of ground truth for a truly terrifying share of the world's economy. Once again, I find myself arriving at the weekend with a giant backlog of links, triggering a linkump, the 15th such dumpage, a variety-pack of miscellany for your weekend.
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