The Arthur Anderson report is a gem. It looks like a newspaper article, just a single column of text weaving down the page; absolutely nothing to disturb the eye as it travels down the page, except for the large AA logo on the top of the page. The logo dominates the report. The Society showed the report to me on March 17, 998, pretending that the report was genuine.  THE "SOCIETY"

The report is about six pages long, and is written in a most comfortable, smooth manner. It always uses the term "we", as in "we did this, we felt that …", but it never defines who "we" is. The overall impression is to give the reader a cool, comfortable feeling that there are a few problems, but nothing serious. Wanda’s description of it as "a quick read" is right on.

The structure of the report is most unusual. There is a long, boring title at the top, which states that AA are going to look into how IA did their investigation. There is a valid date (not difficult). OK, so far. BUT, there are no names on the top, no names on the bottom, no signatures. This report never went through the Arthur Anderson system; it is un-referenceable. It is, without doubt, a forgery based on this information alone

The content is carefully massaged, too. The report spends a lot of time on comments from Alex Brennenstuhl, who is quoted as saying that really, not much is going on. This is bullshit; Alex is the most outspoken person I know, and is always getting into trouble for it. He is incredibly hard on the corporation, division, management etc., and he certainly didn’t make the statements that are quoted in this report. Ask Alex himself.

More significantly, the AA report states that it is going to review the procedures used by Internal Audit. However, when it comes to the financial investigation, the AA report says that these were not investigated again because Internal Audit did them. Quite the contradiction, and not what one expects from an internationally known consulting company.

Even more serious, the Internal Audit financial investigation is flawed: the IA report states that three contracts were given to CARIAD, and gives the individual amounts for each PO. IA claim a total of $74k or so; my sources told me about $300kwent to CARIAD. I happen to have a CARIAD purchase order (legally; the purchasing files are open to all), which doesn’t agree with any of the three PO’s quoted in the IA report. What’s more, my PO has the invoice etc all attached, so we know it was paid.

I called Arthur Anderson about their report, first to Howard Rosen, the original investigator. He wasn’t happy, and rapidly passed me on to Bob Weiss, Office Managing Partner (CEO in most companies, but Arthur Anderson is structured differently). Both Bob Weiss and Howard Rosen confirmed that all Arthur Anderson reports have names, signatures etc., and weren’t too happy to hear the description of their supposed report.

No doubt we could find a lot more faults with the purported Arthur Anderson report, if and when we get sued. However, there is enough known to state categorically that the report that I was shown is a forgery. Somebody must have spent a fair amount of money making the forgery, since it is so "professional". And it’s a good forgery. It certainly passed the Fraud Squad on the first look, and probably passed Bill Farlinger and others. FRAUD SQUAD I