Detailed energy auditing was done to the buildings including interviews to pupils and teachers to understand occupants' behavior, construction materials used, energy consumption and lighting.
After the audit was done, more than half was sent back".
The company said the facilities where repeat audits were done had shown fewer violations.
When the audits were done by the foreign auditing firms, the oversight board said, Brock, Schechter failed to properly review the work papers.
"In a typical year," Mr. Anderson said, "more than 16,000 audits are done before the S.E.C. for public filings -- 99.9percentt of those audits are high quality".
As a result, even if every audit were done properly, there would be no assurance that the results would be comparable.
Among leading firms, KPMG is the least willing to accept that the way audits are done must change, says a rival.
In fact, the comparison to car manufacturers helps to show why it is so hard for the market to sort out whether audits are done well.
Mr. Machado concluded that the audit was done improperly, evidently, he maintained, for suspicious reasons, and thus failed to find that the nonunion arm had indeed acted illegally.
The policy he produced, which became public after the Enron shredding case, emphasized the need to destroy documents that were not essential in proving that audits were done properly.
