Gilded Guilt: "Twelve Blogs" Goes Behind the Magnifying Glass with "White Collar Fraud"

Internal Auditor Independence

I'm not sure that Sam Antar will agree with this analogy, but Sam seems to me to be the Charles Colson of accounting--an apparently successful executive who got caught in wrongdoing and sent to jail. In the legal process, the convict turns from past error and his life changes. Sam's message, though preached with as much conviction as Colson, is much less otherworldly--in the business world; don't trust and verify, just verify (see link to expanded discussion in title). His present emphasis on Overstock requires looking back to his earlier more general statements on fraud, the accounting profession and the importance of trustworthy financial information to the capitalist system. One such post is the above link to internal auditor independence and the importance of keeping the top executives of a company from compromising the effectiveness of internal audit.

Congratulations to Sam; keep up the good work of emphasizing the importance of honest financial reporting and the need for auditors and audit committees to have bulldog/bloodhound tenacity in pursuit of truthfulness. Next week, Tick Marks moves to the personal finance arena to select four more blogs for the 2007 "Twelve Blogs of Christams."