Former staffers at Big 4 accounting firm KPMG are facing civil charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which says they procured confidential information from a congressionally created oversight group to help their employer improve its poor scores on audit reviews.
One-time employees of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board — created in the aftermath of complaints that accounting firm Arthur Anderson failed in its responsibilities with bankrupt energy firm Enron — told KPMG which audits the board planned to assess, enabling workers there to avoid criticism by inspectors for roughly two years through February 2017, the SEC said in a statement on Monday.
Two of the six accountants identified by the SEC had left the board to take jobs at KPMG and a third, still employed at the oversight group at the time, was seeking a job at the firm, the agency said. The first of the employees to move, Brian Sweet, has been charged by federal prosecutors with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States, according to a complaint unsealed Monday.
The accusations in the case involve “shocking misconduct — literally stealing the exam,” Steven Peikin, co-director of the SEC’s enforcement division, said in a statement. The “inspections program is meant to assess whether firms are cutting corners, compromising their independence, or otherwise falling short in their responsibilities,” he said. “The SEC cannot tolerate any scheme to subvert that important process.”
KPMG, a Dutch firm with U.S. offices in New York and Washington, has been “fully cooperating with the government in its investigation,” firm spokesman Manuel Goncalves said in a statement.
“KPMG took swift and decisive action, including the engagement of outside legal counsel to conduct a detailed investigation” and the termination of people involved, he said. “Since then, KPMG has taken remedial actions to assure that such conduct cannot happen again.”
The chain of events detailed by the SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan began in April 2015, when Sweet was preparing to leave the accounting board, where he had worked for six years, and downloaded “confidential and sensitive inspection-related materials.” He believed the information would help him in his new job in the KPMG division responsible for ensuring a good performance on inspections, according to court records and the SEC.
KPMG had been given deficient scores on nearly half of the audits reviewed in 2013 and received written questions on more than half of those scrutinized in 2014, twice the rate of competitors, according to prosecutors and the SEC. Audits of corporate financial statements play a pivotal role in ensuring shareholders in publicly-traded companies have accurate information about their investments, and the SEC, which oversees the board, told KPMG in January 2015 that it had developed concerns about the quality of the firm’s audits.
In May of that year, when Sweet came on board, then-national managing partner for audit quality David Middendorf and then-national partner-in-charge for inspections Thomas Whittle, along with another high-level partner at the firm, capital markets group co-leader David Britt, worked with him to review audits of seven client banks they believed the accounting board was going to inspect, the SEC said.
Middendorf and Whittle gave orders that no one involved should disclose that they had information from the board, the SEC said.
Once established at KPMG, Sweet continued to get confidential materials from Cynthia Holder, a board inspector, the SEC said. When she joined him at KPMG, a third board employee, Jeffrey Wada, began to provide tipoffs, the agency maintains.
Upon learning what had happened last year, the board began a review of its safeguards for confidential information and will continue examining its technological security, compliance and ethics rules to ensure their effectiveness, chairman William Duhnke said in a statement on Monday.
“Today’s actions should send a clear signal,” he said, that “undermining the integrity of our programs will not be tolerated.”
SEC Chair Jay Clayton, an appointee of President Trump, said he supported the commission’s action in the case and called the allegations “disturbing.”
“Audited financial statements are at the heart of the SEC’s disclosure-based regulatory regime,” he said in a statement. “A company’s financial statements provide investors with a wealth of material information, and independent audits give investors confidence that those statements can be trusted.
Still, he said, the case shouldn’t affect the ability of publicly traded companies to use KPMG audits in SEC filings or render the reports unreliable to investors.
