These days, it seems as if a new interesting revelation from one of the big U.S. accounting firms occurs every few hours or so.
This CBS Marketwatch snippet reports this morning that KPMG LLP fired Richard Smith, a senior executive who had headed its tax-services division as it promoted questionable tax shelters over the past decade, and also canned two partners — David Brockway of Washington, D.C. and Michael Burke of Los Angeles — who had sat on the firm’s 15-member board. As these previous posts over the past year reflect, KPMG is enduring some serious heat in various governmental investigations of its involvement in the tax shelter sales effort.
Until the tax shelter probes, Mr. Smith had been a rising star at KPMG. He became a partner at KPMG in 1995 and was named the chief of the firm’s tax-services unit in 2002. However, as the tax shelter probes came to light in February, 2004, KPMG had said Mr. Smith was being reassigned to take on the dreaded “different practice responsibilities.”
Such purges usually indicate that indictments in such cases are on their way. Stay tuned.