No one becomes an auditor because the job is adventurous. In recent years, however, the profession has been really rather racy. Auditors have been implicated in fraud after fraud. The Enron scandal brought down Arthur Andersen, which had been one of the profession's five giant firms. Now a scandal at Italy's Parmalat that was uncovered in late 2003 threatens Deloitte & Touche, another global giant, as well as Grant Thornton, an important second-tier firm. And new scandals are still emerging: most recently, financial manipulation was discovered at Fannie Mae, America's quasi-governmental mortgage lender, and at Nortel Networks, a tele-coms-equipment group.
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