re: The Auditors

McKenna Finalist For UCLA’s Loeb Awards For Business Journalism

I have been named a finalist for UCLA's Gerald Loeb Awards for my work in Forbes magazine last year. I'm a "professional who writes" but also a professional writer and a journalist. You've been warned.

Berkshire Hathaway and Swiss Re: It Wasn’t Really A Win-Win

Like a lot of things Buffett and Berkshire, there's more to the Swiss Re dispute resolution story than the snappy repartee tells you.

McKenna Writes For Accountancy On Offshore Profit Shifting By Multinationals

Multinationals are under increasing scrutiny for income shifting and offshoring profits. I reported on the issues and U.S. legislative status in December in Accountancy, a magazine for the profession in the UK.

How KPMG Explains Scott London To The Accounting Professors

Here's how KPMG Chairman John Veihmeyer explained Scott London's inside trading and the firm's response to accounting professors, an important stop in the audit industry supply chain.

Speaking Engagements/Conferences

Here's where I'll be and where I've been. I've added a link to the text from my speech at Texas Tech this past week and a link to an interview in March with Broc Romanek at TheCorporateCounsel.net blog on aduit industry developments.

McKenna Writes For “Investor Advocate” From Law Firm Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman

BLBG publishes the Advocate for Institutional Investors, a quarterly newsletter which contains reporting and analysis of the latest securities and corporate law issues. The Advocate often features articles by the management and general counsel of some of the largest public pension funds in the country, as well as some of the nation’s premier securities litigators. This Spring the magazine also features my writing on the subject of private litigation against audit firms.

Scott London Subverted Sarbanes-Oxley: Big Four Mock Audit Partner Rotation

I noticed a small little thing in one of the first stories about Scott London. As I tried to research and write about it, I waited for someone else to pick up on it. (No one else did.) Scott London seems to have subverted the intent of Sarbanes-Oxley Section 203 that requires lead engagement partner rotation off engagements to promote objectivity, independence and professional skepticism.

Early Returns: Scott London, KPMG and Another Partner Trading On Inside Information

This is the fourth big insider trading case in the least few years against a senior tenured partner that betrayed the public's trust. In none of the cases did the firm's "extensive" and "comprehensive" independence compliance programs spot the behavior or the illegal actions. Stay tuned. There will be much more to this story, I guarantee.

JPMorgan Chase, And Dimon, Starting To Sweat About Everything

I put two new columns up at Forbes recently that talk about JPMorgan, PwC, Senator Levin's "Whale" hearings, and all the other stuff JPMorgan and Jamie Dimon are really worried about.

A New e-Book: Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway: Corporate Governance and The Sokol Affair, Part One

This compilation, Part One, covers the period from April 4 - when the David Sokol scandal hit - to May 3, 2011 when I attended the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.