“Repeated Audit Failures”
The SEC issued multiple enforcement and litigation releases that documented the
GTGI accounting fraud. One of these releases analyzed the “repeated audit failures”
of KPMG, GTGI’s independent audit fi rm during the course of that fraud. 14 The SEC’s
criticism of KPMG focused on three facets of the fi rm’s GTGI audits.
According to the SEC, the GTGI audit engagement team should have contacted
KPMG’s technical staff in the firm’s headquarters office when the auditors uncovered
suspicious and unusual transactions recorded by the client. The federal agency believed
that such consultation would almost certainly have resulted in more thorough
investigations of those transactions and ultimately led to KPMG discovering their
fraudulent nature. Although KPMG had a “consultation policy” at the time, the SEC suggested that the policy was not suffi ciently comprehensive or rigorous, which explained
why the GTGI engagement team had failed to ask for the assistance of the
fi rm’s technical staff.
The SEC also faulted the “materiality determinations” of the GTGI audit engagement
team. A key feature of the GTGI fraud was Henry Yuen’s effort to infl ate the operating
results of the new Interactive Platform Sector. According to the SEC, the GTGI
auditors should have been aware of that sector’s disproportionate importance to not
only Yuen but also to financial analysts and other parties tracking the company’s
fi nancial performance. Because the KPMG auditors relied on quantitative measures
of materiality, they failed to adequately investigate the relatively nominal operating
results of the Interactive Platform Sector.“. . . the KPMG auditors . . . unreasonably determined that the [Interactive Platform
Sector] revenues were immaterial to Gemstar’s financial statements. The KPMG
auditors’ materiality determinations were unreasonable in that they only considered
quantitative materiality (i.e., that the amount of revenue was not a large percentage
of Gemstar’s consolidated financial results) and failed to also consider qualitative
materiality (i.e., that the revenue related to business lines that were closely watched
by securities analysts and had a material effect on the valuation of Gemstar stock) The bulk of the lengthy SEC enforcement release that examined the role of KPMG
in the GTGI debacle focused on the audit fi rm’s consideration of several large revenue
transactions that the company used to infl ate and distort its operating results.
Listed next are the most important of these transactions and the SEC’s related criticism
of the GTGI audit engagement team.