Re: The boss is always responsible
The thing to take into consideration, is that often consolidation of accounting information into the published accounts mean that fraud can be present in an entity without necessarily being reflected in the documents you sign.
i.e. if you are signing off accounts rounded to the nearest million, fraud of less than that value is unlikely to appear in the documents you are signing off. Or more relevant to this case, if you have revenue recognised in the wrong financial period when the difference is likely to have been a few days.
In this particular case, as long as the revenue was received (I believe it was), but only the timing was adjusted in a group company, that may not clearly reflect in the summary accounts provided to KPMG/HP (i.e. those that Lynch can be held accountable for) but are in the underlying accounting information (the details HP check following the acquisition).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
