It will be interesting to see whether auditors are willing to make clear that a company engaged in aggressive, though legal, accounting. That has not happened yet, but it is possible that a threat from an auditor to make such a statement could lead a company to revise its accounting before the figures are released.
In Extracting Deal From JPMorgan, U.S. Aimed for Bottom Line
“Unless you hold the executives accountable, it really is just the cost of doing business,” said Bart Naylor, a policy advocate at Public Citizen, who noted that the settlements hurt shareholders more than executives.
And during a conference call on Tuesday, Marianne Lake, JPMorgan’s chief financial officer, emphasized that $7 billion of the settlement was tax-deductible.