KPMG is in the middle of an unbelievably dirty cheating scandal that keeps on getting uglier

KPMG is one of the "Big Four" accounting firms: that means that whenever a plan for a business or a public project has a box that says, "Make sure no one is cheating," it means that you hire KPMG or one of its rivals to come in and check the books and make sure that everything is on the level. If you can't trust the accounting firm, the whole thing falls apart.

You'll never guess what happened next.

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. Read the rest