Software Needs An Independent Auditor
I am Daksh - a co-founder of Greptile, the AI code reviewer that catches bugs in pull requests for thousands of software teams.
The month I was born, October 2001, was also the month Enron collapsed. For those unfamiliar, Enron was an energy company founded in 1985. It was one of the most valuable companies in the US public markets at the turn of the century. In 2001, it was discovered that under investor pressure to perform following the inflated expectations of the dot-com bubble, Enron had been hiding billions in debt in off-balance sheet entities.
Arthur Andersen - one of the “Big Five” auditing firms - had audited and approved their books, and had neglected to surface Enron’s accounting fraud.
The most interesting part of this story for me was that AA was more than just Enron’s auditor. They were doing a number of other consulting jobs across the company. In fact, over half of the $50M that Enron was paying them every year was for these consulting jobs, not auditing. This is important and will come up later.
In the following months, three more high-profile scandals were uncovered - Global Crossing, Tyco, and Worldcom collectively lost investors billions of dollars, all engaged in some manner of financial and accounting fraud.
