Satyam accounting scandal

In January of 2009 Satyam, an Indian based IT services company was involved in an enormous accounting scandal.  The CEO, Ramalingam Raju, admitted to overstating the companies assets.  Satyam overstated cash by $1.5 billion, overstated accounts receivable by $100 million, and understated their liabilities by $250 million.  The ICAI which is India's regulator of chartered accountants issued a show-cause notice to PricewaterhouseCoopers which was Satyam's auditor.  SEBI which is a stock market regulator said that if found guilty with their involvement in the scandal PricewaterhouseCoopers could lose its license to work in India.  Satyam was the winner of the 2008 Golden Peacock Award for Corporate Governance under risk management and compliance issues.  They were stripped of the award after the scandal broke.  The Indian division of PricewaterhouseCoopers announced that it relied on potentially false information that was given to them by the management of Satyam.  They said this false information may have rendered its audit reports inaccurate and unreliable.  The CEO Mr. Raju had allegedly been withdrawing around $4 million from the company every month to pay 13,000 employees that were not working for the company.  The computer services company restated financial results for a period of six years from 2002 to 2008 and published the results in September of 2009. 
India's PricewaterhouseCooper's firms agreed to pay a class action securities settlement of $25.5 million which included fines and penalties of $7.5 million to the SEC and PCAOB for noncompliance with generally accepted auditing standards.  The SEC and PCAOB said that quality failures had occurred in the Satyam audit over a period of a number of years, and compliance failures were occuring across PricewaterhouseCoopers entire practice in India.  PricewaterhouseCoopers auditors failed to maintain control and did not confirm with a third party the information they were given by Satyam's management.