OPSB accounting shift is good policy

Making sure that the Orleans Parish School Board follows the Sarbanes-Oxley law isn't a bad idea, even if it slows down the process of getting turnaround company Alvarez & Marsal on board:

The accounting company that has managed the books of the New Orleans public school system for the past three months will be cut out of the picture as turnaround experts Alvarez & Marsal take over the system's battered finances for the next two years.

That translates into the loss of expertise gained by Deloitte Consulting in examining and managing the system's operations, officials said. In addition to its high-powered role in the past three months, the company also examined the system's finances late last year under a separate consulting deal.

If there's that much expertise being lost, perhaps Alvarez & Marsal can hire some of these essential Deloitte personnel themselves, but either way, the accounting/consulting company should go.

It's a coincidence that it was Deloitte that provided me with a firsthand example of why Sarbanes-Oxley makes sense, but it's still something I've asked for years. When I worked at Pan-American Life Insurance, a Deloitte partner was advising the human resources VP on layoffs at a time when Deloitte was the public accounting firm doing the insurance company's audit. Even my CPA wife could not provide me with a reasonable answer for how a company that is so entrenched in business operations can be independent in an audit of those operations.

OPSB is such a terrible mess that new auditors might be a bad idea. "Experience" has cost the school system a lot of money in the last 20 years.