Steve MacLellan

For more than a year, regulators have known that KPMG employees had been
stealing regulatory information and using it to cheat on inspections of
its audits – they’d steal the FEC’s list of upcoming inspection
targets and revise their work to make sure the inspections didn’t find
any flaws. The SEC was set to hand down a $50m fine.

Then, yesterday, the SEC announced that they’d found a second, even more
disturbing pattern of cheating, one that went right to the top, with
KPMG’s most senior staff cheating on their integrity exams
(!!), sharing answers in advance, and hacking the tests to lower the
score needed to pass it (the tests were delivered online, and in the URL
for the test was a variable that set the percentage needed for a
passing grade: “MasteryScore=70” – by lowering this value, cheaters
could turn any number of right answers into a pass). Some auditors
“passed” their ethics exams with a score of only 25%.

These exams tested auditors on their ethics, their expertise, and their
mastery of the continuing education courses they were required to take
to remain licensed to practice.