EDITORIAL

No rehabilitation for KPMG without full disclosure of SARS manoeuvring

24 September 2017 - 00:02 By SUNDAY TIMES

Auditing has long been one of the professions held in the highest regard in our country, with many top matriculants choosing it as their field of study.
Likewise, South African auditing practice has rightly been classed with the best globally for many years.
That is why KPMG's complicity in state capture is a bigger body blow for South Africa than many realise. Auditing firms were the most trusted final bulwark against fraud, mismanagement and corruption.
KPMG's conduct has sullied auditing's reputation and, like Humpty Dumpty, it may never be repaired, unfair as that undoubtedly is to the country's many excellent auditors.
This impacts on the auditing profession and all businesses that have used and trusted them. Who do you trust to state the truth if you can't trust auditors?It must tell us whether it agreed to import sections of a memo from SARS's lawyers into its final report.
It must tell us whether and to what extent SARS commissioner Tom Moyane was involved in changing the mandate.
It must release the now-infamous report and explain which parts were compromised by interference from SARS and/or lack of oversight by KPMG partners, and which parts - if any - retain any integrity.
It must tell us explicitly how its work for the Gupta entities fell short. Any meaningful effort to roll back the harm must entail exposing the details of the problems it should have exposed at the time.
Nothing short of full and frank disclosure will allow South Africans to understand what happened. The firm has played us for fools already. It will not get away with doing so again. There can be no rehabilitation for KPMG without such full disclosure.
It is not good enough to acknowledge that the firm did not grasp the new risks associated with the extended SARS mandate, or to admit that it should have resigned as the Gupta auditors earlier than it did.A commission appointed by the president? No, he is compromised and implicated. The NPA? Surely not under Shaun Abrahams. Should the public protector be asked? Maybe not the current one.
Shall we ask the National Treasury? Not during the term of a cabinet member who naturalised the Guptas, keeps incompetent intimate presidential friends on the boards of state-owned enterprises, benefited from the shady firing of his excellent predecessor and behaves more like an overwhelmed tourist than a finance minister...

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