The accountant for Bernard Madoff surrendered today to the FBI on charges of performing phony audits and fraudulent filings. David Friehling appears to have just “rubber stamped” the financial statements and appeared to perform little or no audit procedures. You can read more details about the story here but this guy makes all CPA’s look bad. He apparently had almost no employees, was auditing the records of a huge organization and lied to the AICPA about being a tax firm only. Sounds like a great person. He clearly knew or at least should have known of this Ponzi scheme. If investors would have spent a little more time performing due diligence on this one, they would have uncovered that Madoff’s CPA firm was not qualified to issue an opinion on his financial statement. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this one. Is all the blame for this fraud on Bernard Madoff and his accountant? Should the investors have done a little more homework?
Comments