Francine Mckenna (whose blog is a "must read" for anyone with interest in the Big 4) tells today of her recent application to serve on the PCAOB - the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board,which as it says on its own web site has as its mission:
Francine is qualified for the job. She was one of only 90 candidates. And they never even acknowledged the application. The didn't even, as she put it:
say, "Thanks, but you're not our kind," or maybe, "Thanks, but someone from the Big 4 said no way..." or maybe, "Thanks, but you're not a lawyer or a muckety-muck, or a yes-girl or a rah-rah or part of the clique..."
But that's the reality. They didn't want her precisely because she can think for herself. They know that. As she shows from her site statistics, the PCAOB visits her blog every day.
But you wouldn't want a regulator who rocked the boat would you? After all, they might come up with something.
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PS This reminds me of the one and only time in the last quarter century that I applied for a job. I was daft enough to apply to be a director of a Primary Care Trust. They wanted someone with financial expertise, or so they said. I thought I might fit the bill. And I had a history of public service on a voluntary basis, and knew something of the medical field.
At the interview I asked what they were going to do about their deficit and whether as trustees the directors were personally liable for it. The Chair did not know.
I did not get the job. A social worker with no obvious financial expertise got it. I made a formal request for explanation. Apparently the panel had concluded my verbal and written communication skills were 'very poor' and my financial understanding was 'limited'. In the days after I got the letter I had an article in the national press, appeared on television as an expert financial commentator and went to the Cabinet Office to brief on a financial matter.
The moral is simple. Comfortable people don't want trouble makers. But sure as heck the world needs us. As George Bernard Shaw said:
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.
I couldn't have put it better. And I happen to think Francine wholly unreasonable - and all the better for it.
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Richard, as alwasy, thanks for the vote of confidence! What did Groucho Marx once say? “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept people like me as members.”