"There is no true number in accounting," he says, "and if there were, auditors would be the last people to find it".Instead he wants to shed light on the processes of calculation that lead to the numbers in the accounts.
Would Mr. Duncan have acted differently if he had known that in a few years there would be auditors from some other firm looking over his work?
There are no auditors who go into your space and see things other than your own friends.
The nonprofit arts and culture organizations support more jobs than there are accountants, auditors, public safety officers, even lawyers and just slightly fewer jobs than the elementary school teacher sector.
But as it grew, supervisors did not always ensure that the work done there was of high quality, auditors found.
Auditors even have more business, thanks to the new rules they must implement.Yet despite this flurry of activity, behind the scenes there is a feeling among auditors that they are still a long way from meeting all the challenges they face.
Already, regulators worry that there are too few auditors for the industry to be competitive.
Haris Theoharis, Greece's secretary general for public revenues, agreed with some of the union's arguments, including that there are too few auditors.
Also of interest to the board is whether it might require rotation only for a subset of publicly traded companies, like the largest companies; whether there are enough qualified auditors to permit giant multinational companies to change regularly; and whether the practice would lead to opinion shopping.
While there are many stakeholders, auditors, reporting requirements and accreditation organizations, there are no organizations or individuals who are tasked to disrupt the status quo to create positive change.
There were no auditors at Camp Arifjan, and contracts worth more than $500,000 were the only ones requiring review in Washington.
