Doubts raised on auditing firms worldwide

Singapore regulators investigating Noble’s auditor Ernst and Young. This is not unusual as the big four auditors, Deloitte, KPMG, PWC, and EY were also under probe in the UK according to a Bloomberg report. Below are a few paras of a report by Bloomberg on MAS’ investigating EY after the fall from grace of Noble, once a hot favourite of punters in the Singapore Exchange. Its share price had fallen to a few miserable cents and the stock has been suspended from trading pending a refinancing and restructuring exercise to save the company.

‘Noble’s accounting has been in focus since early 2015, when
a previously unknown group called Iceberg Research started
criticizing the company, saying it had inflated the value of
long-term commodity contracts and carried billions of dollars in
profits on its books that would eventually have to be written
down.


Since then, the once $12 billion company has lost billions
in value, reduced to a rump by untenable debt and writedowns --
including on many of the contracts that Iceberg had been
criticizing.

"You see repeated clean audits, and then suddenly you have
these big writedowns," Lee Boon Ngiap, assistant managing
director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, told Bloomberg.
"That’s something regulators will pay attention to – and move to
ask questions, press more."’ Bloomberg

The blind faith in western auditing firms is another angmoh tua kee thing. Anything western must be good, no need to question, sure to be done professionally and honestly. One of these firms was the auditor of the AHTC accounts and the cross examinations in court revealed many loopholes and personal opinions that were anything but factual from rubbish heads.

Not only auditing firms, the western banks were reputed to be highly professionally run, with impeccable records, transparent and unquestionable trust in what they said until the banking crisis when all the top western banks, reporting billions and billions of profits, suddenly declared insolvent. How could this happen, cooking the books all the years, hazy accounting and management practices, the biggest money launderers, but not discovered by the reputable auditors?

When reading the glorious reports of billions of dollars of profits by the local banks, the scenario of the collapse of western banks keeps appearing in my mind. So similar, would they be adopting the same hide and seek accounting? Are they using the same auditing firms? Hopefully not as Singapore is reputed to have the strictest banking regulations under the watchful eyes of our incorruptible and most conscientious regulators.

The western media too were taken as the publishers of truth, unquestionable truth, and accepted as the authority of all news and information in their prints. Today every one of these western media are churning out fake news and disinformation. Unfortunately silly bananas would still regard them as the messengers to truth, nothing but the truth despite Trump, the US President, discrediting every one of them as untrustworthy. Would the lies and rubbish churned out by the western media be accepted as the truth and would not be questioned by our ministry in charge of fake news and disinformation?

Is there anything left in the West that is honourable, worthy of being trustworthy and reliable and not cheats, conmen, tricksters and liars?