#Carillion

[variouspolltournaments]

[themancorialist]

New Cathedral Street, Manchester.

[warriorviscera]

valentine and the no-good very bad horrible day

[18arte]

citta' natale ad arezzo 2023

[jobaaj]

HAVE YOU HEARD: KPMG has been hit with a record fine! The UK’s Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has imposed a fine of $26 million on KPMG!!! This fine was imposed by the regulator due to the failures observed in the audit of Carillion by KPMG. For the unaware, Carillion was a construction services company which collapsed in January 2018 due to declining revenues, slimming bottom lines, and surging debt. At the time of liquidation, the company had a debt of $1.6 billion!

Read full story: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/casakshamagarwal_audit-kpmg-big4-activity-7118513217374437376-6XAU?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Follow Jobaaj Stories (the Media arm of Jobaaj.com Group) for more.

[canisbeasts-ooc]

ask game: number 25 for all trolls (choose any you want to talk about)

- the meower (woof)

Oooo okay

25. What is your favorite thing about your OC?

Sphinx: I love her arc, honestly! I’m excited to see her go off the wall, to feel happy with herself and have a newfound sort of freedom and family!

Respit: I love his quirk so much, it makes us snicker nearly every time we use it! I also really like how his story and quest kinda goes with the theme of a sacrificial lamb, especially since it’s kinda the exact opposite of what he tries to be!

Styrss: I love having a character that just does not care about the general grumblr stuff! She is in her own lane and chilling! Having a great time doing so!

Lykoii: Similar to Sphinx, I like that he’s able to become happier and find a place he really enjoys being in, where he feels safe and has people he can truly depend on :>

The Carillion: Sadness! I love how sad she is! She is bitter and angry, and will try to blame everyone but herself for her circumstances!

The Botanist: His death, probably. His death starts off a chain reaction for both The Carillion and Styrss, in a way, and it’s such a contrast to Sphinx and Respit

The Compiler: The horror of it all! I rarely get to play around with horror themes and with her, it’s really fun! Also having a character that’s a kinda a computer, but not quite, is a fun idea to play with!

The Confines: How he takes loss to the absolute extreme. He is Lykoii’s traits all turned up to 11. He practically tries to play god with those under his care and it is interesting to me!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Big Four accounting firms are one (more) scandal away from collapse

One of the wildest features of the crypto wipeout is that all of these “multi-billion-dollar” firms never bothered with an independent audit, and they all turned out to be lying about their balance sheets.

Amidst this carnage, it’s easy to forget that the Big Four accounting firms are terrible enablers of fraud, and the fact that they sign off on your books is no guarantee that you’re not a giant scam waiting to implode.

This is just wild to consider. After all, independent auditors are the lifeblood of capitalism. Rich people really need to know that the people they trust with their money aren’t lying about their finances. Usually rich people get their way.

But not with accounting. Accountancy has dwindled to four massive, structurally important, terminally conflicted companies: EY, KPMG, PWC and Deloitte, and all four make more money selling “consulting” to companies than they do for signing off on their books.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/18/ink-stained-wretches/#countless

That means that the Big Four routinely sign off on fraudulent books, because a failure to make nice with companies that are cheating the taxman and/or their investors and/or their creditors will cost the Big Four those fat consulting contracts.

Besides, the Big Four have a sweet gig: when they sign off on fraudulent books — as all four did for Carillion, the company that went bust in 2018 after billions went missing — they are the only companies big enough to oversee the bankruptcies. All four made millions off of Carillion’s bankruptcies.

Shorn of any consequences for wrongdoing, the Big Four are hotbeds of corruption. Who can forget when KPMG’s top management was fined millions…for helping their auditors cheat…on ethics exams (!!!!).

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#crooked-ref

There is a contradiction at the heart of “consulting” and auditing. The consultant’s job is to help a company obscure its bad deeds — for example, helping it hide its tax fraud, or its wage theft — while an auditor’s job is to bring transparency to a company’s financials. These two activities are fundamentally incompatible with one another, and the fact that the Big Four make more money from cooking books than from uncooking them means that they forever lurch from scandal to scandal.

Those scandals are getting worse, and if a very big one should break, it could bring down the whole sector and with it, large swathes of the economy. Writing for The Dig, Jim Peterson describes the system risk:

https://thedig.substack.com/p/tipping-point-the-financial-fragility

The problem lies in the fact that the Big Four are “voluntary private partnerships to which individual accountants commit their energy, reputations and personal capital.” If a scandal threatens the business, partners who quit might get away clean, while those that stay behind will be mired in scandal and financial ruin.

That means that when disaster looms, each partner is better off individually running for the doors, even though a disciplined stay-and-hold posture might let the firm weather the storm. This is exactly what happened at Arthur Andersen during the Enron collapse, and the risk to other firms was identified by “Study on the Economic Impact of Auditors’ Liability Regimes,” a 2006 EU report:

https://www.iasplus.com/en/binary/europe/0610audit.pdf

The thing is, each partner at a big firm knows exactly how much dirty laundry they have personally buried in the company’s garden, and they have well-founded suspicions about what their partners have buried out there, too. When someone starts digging, they’re all gonna scarper.

Which is to say that if a firm faces sufficiently steep litigation damages or enforcement penalties, it could precipitate a sudden collapse of one of the remaining Big Four firms. That wouldn’t just be bad news for the firm — its clients would struggle to land another large auditor to sign off on its books.

Remember, most of the world’s auditing capacity has been gathered into four giant, brittle, opaque, compromised firms — if one of them goes bust, the remaining Big Three won’t have the capacity to take on its orphaned clients.

Peterson: “another collapse would strand significant numbers of the world’s large public companies, leaving them unable to procure the audit opinions required for their securities listings and regulatory compliance, from any source and at any price.”

Peterson’s written a fascinating-sounding book on the structural problems with monopolized accounting, “Count Down: The Past, Present and Uncertain Future of the Big Four Accounting Firms,” which is in its second edition:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/doi/10.1108/9781787147003

Image: Vectorportal.com (modified) https://vectorportal.com/vector/business-deal-illustration/23215

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Inspired by an illustration by Matt Kenyon for the Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/07184d86-81cf-11e2-b050-00144feabdc0

[Image ID: Two business-suited male figures seen side on; each has a bomb for a head, and each is holding a lit lighter that has ignited the other's fuse. Each bomb is wearing a green accountant's eyeshade. In the background is a fiery mushroom cloud.]

[swallowtail-ageha]

Viola's model being simply a palette swapped plain doll model and she uses a carillion that has mergo's lullaby in it which could mean absolutely nothing

[sortyourlifeoutmate]

I do love the contrast between some of the stories you get coming out of schools where it’s things like:

“Some of our pupils have to keep coats and gloves on during lessons as it’s so cold.”

“Lessons are taking place in marquees outside because of the RAAC.”

“These draughty windows are being kept shut with stickers.”

“This one school has to keep being evacuated because of flooding and dangerous build-ups of explosive sewage gas.”

And the DfE’s stated position is that staff and pupil safety is “paramount”.

Is it? Is it though, Department for Education? Because that’s not really the impression we’re getting here! When you get classes taking place in temporary – ‘temporary’ – portacabins from the sixties which get down to seven degrees inside (that’s Celsius, obviously) when the minimum is seventeen, well, that’s not safe, is it?

In a tiny, tiny bit of fairness, the DfE does admit that the repair bill is huge. More huge, in fact, than the budget allocated to them by the treasury. So it’s not technically all the fault of the DfE. It’s the fault of the government in a general sense. Quelle surprise.

But that’s not exactly a huge comfort.

I like this bit in particular:

At Russell Scott Primary School in Denton, Greater Manchester, head teacher Steve Marsland empties out buckets of water collected from leaks around the school whenever it rains. In 2015, the school underwent a multi-million pound refurbishment to its 150-year-old building. But Carillion, the company contracted to carry out the repairs, left the school with a catalogue of new problems, including faulty fire doors. Carillion has since gone bankrupt, with debts of more than £7bn, and the school has been left battling issues old and new, including flooding, roofs leaking and heating failures for nearly a decade.

It got fixed – to the tune of millions of pounds – and things just got a different kind of bad!

So yeah, great stuff, guys. Top work all round. Really looking forward to whoever wins the next election going hell for leather on ‘growth’ so all these rich cunts who’d love to solve these problems, no doubt, can ‘invest’ and ‘grow’ and all that money can totally not disappear into the aether never to be seen again.

What a time to be alive.

[eopederson2]

Ladner Clock Tower, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2009.

The clock tower houses a 330-bell carillion, and there are frequent concerts.

[every-mini-ive-painted]

My PC Garci di Carillion, Goblin Swashbuckler

[phishartdotnet]

Ticket stubs I created for Phish's 2-night run in Dayton, OH during their 2023 fall tour. I have been creating these since they stopped offering physical tickets.

The artwork was inspired by the Aullwood Trolls created by recycle artist Thomas Dambo. These sculptures reside minutes away from the venue at the Aullwood Audubon. I also included a reference to Dayton residents the Wright brothers and the bell tower at Carillion Park.

Tickets available here: https://joseeen.etsy.com/listing/1571201548

[farseerprincess]

SOME OF MY REALM OF ELDERLINGS FANCAST

i’ll be super glad to know yours !

Harry Gilby as FitzChivalry Farseer (not sure)

I gen cant find anyone for the fool

Rosamund Pike as Lady Carillion Carrock Waljin

Jamie Campbell Bower as Regal Farseer (with black hair like this pic)

Sean Dean as Burrich

Rachel Zegler as Molly Chandler

Oscar Isaac as Verity Farseer

Natalie Portman as Lady Patience

Henry Cavill as Chivalry Farseer

[pliff1975]

Thomas Rees Memorial Carillion , Springfield IL after midnight.

[wasted-my-time]

By the fireplace

@make-me-your-animal I said it would be a quick one!

___________________________________________

California is supposed to be sunny all the time, isn't it? So tell me why did the sun have to go on a strike on the very first day of my holiday! Or my last day of work, it depends on how you see it...

I get home, drenched because of the rain and sigh as I kick of my shoes in a wet suction sound. Yuck!

-So it wasn't that good of a day, innit? I hear Phil asking from the kitchen.

-Do you have other understatements?

-Maybe this will help. He comed up to me with what seems to be twk cocktails, which is... Surprising, to say the least.

-Made with alcohol-free gin that Sav recommended me. He explains in response to my puzzled face.

-Oh, fine then! But I'm gonna' change first. I answer and point at my soggy clothes.

-Sure, I'll wait for you in the living room!

Of course, when I return to join him, this time in the comforting dryness of a pair of sweatpants and one of his old T-shirts, he's got his guitar with him and is sitting on the edge of the brick fireplace.

-How cheesy is this going to get?

-Not that much actually, since I've been working on songs here for the whole day.

-And I thought it was all for me. I pout and sit on the couch to take a sip of my drink, which was waiting for me on the coffee table. You know what, Sav's a liar, this thing can't be fake. I joke.

-Yeah, that's what I thought too at first!

-So, show me that thing you've bee writing.

-I thought you'd never ask! Ok, so here's one I think you'll like, Joe has lyrics, he called it All We Need, but I only have the intro so far and it's not done and I'll probably change it and...

-Stop! Play it, then you can beat it up.

-Yeah, sure...

He starts this little jangly thing, reminding of a carillion in the wind. As he said it's just a short segment, but it is very nice.

-You were right when you said I would like it! But do you know what would make it better?

-No, tell me.

-I'll say it if you come here. I state the condition with a teasy smile.

-Alright. He accepts before resting his Telecaster on its stand and sitting just a foot away from me. What is it?

-No, closer. I insist and put my glass back on the table.

He closes the gap between us, then puts an arm around me and rests his head on my shoulder, looking up at me with those ever so blue eyes that makes me melt inside.

-Now?

-That's the missing thing. I finally say and plant a kiss on his lips.

-Now I think I have another song idea... He whispers after I let go of his mouth.

-Tomorrow. Right now, you're finding inspiration and nothing else, is that clear?

-Yes ma'am. He smiles and lay me down on the couch for another, much longer kiss.