Many ask where I find things to write about. In addition to emails, calls and personal meetings with sources, over time I’ve developed a combination of Google Alerts, blogs and traditional media, and key Tweeters that I monitor, pretty much, 24/7.

I laugh out loud at the earnestness of some of firms’ press releases. You can quickly spot a “new study” or a particular PR push because it puts a firm on the front page of every newspaper and blog that’s even remotely interested in these announcements. Journalists and bloggers, especially those who have rigid deadlines and production quotas, are starving for content.

Getting a press release for a new study or a juicy pitch with a quote offer from one of the firms is a gift. Barring any other big news, you can almost guarantee anyone on a deadline or pressured for content will use it. It’s a sad comment on modern mainstream media and their lackluster coverage of the accounting industry when I see the same exact press release, with little variation or added research, analysis, or “god-forbid” contrary facts reprinted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and some obscure accounting blog.

I chafe at the cheekiness of some of the announcements. The firms’ communications teams are blithely unaware of how such shameless self-promotion looks to those who are watching closely. For example, all of the Big 4 firms were named to the Fortune 100 Best Places To Work list, even though it’s been well documented that they’ve cut thousands, under cover of “bad” performance and “no fit,” with no press releases, minimal communication to clients, and sometimes not a word to the client engagement partners.

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, the firm that reaped the vast majority of the audit windfall from the financial crisis as auditor of JP Morgan and Bank of America, auditor of “vampire squid” Goldman Sachs, constant problem child AIG, and super-fun Freddie Mac, is now giving others tips on how to take advantage of the banking crisis. This is the same PwC that audited Northern Rock and Huron Consulting, Satyam and a plethora of Madoff feeder funds.

A PwC whitepaper, “Opportunities in Crisis: Managing Unique Accounting and Reporting Challenges in Government Assisted Transactions,” is now available.

Listen to PwC. They should know.

And then there was Ernst and Young’s Chairman Jim Turley speaking at the Global Competitiveness Forum on the topic, “Global Risks 2010.” Mr. Turley is the Chairman of a firm that recently saw four of their partners sentenced to prison for tax shelter fraud, six of their partners including national leadership partners sanctioned by the SEC for a fraud at Bally’s. EY is also facing billions of dollars of lawsuits – for their role as auditors of Lehman Brothers, for several Madoff feeder funds, and for a massive fraud in Asia.

Maybe Mr. Turley should stay home and tend to his own global risks.

Deloitte is the first US public accounting firm to publish a “transparency report.”

Advancing Quality Through Transparency includes information about the governance structure, ethical principles, and quality control procedures of the Deloitte U.S. Entities—with a particular focus on the audit practice of Deloitte & Touche LLP…

The report was produced by the auditor of Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, Parmalat and Merrill Lynch. This is the same firm that’s suing their own Vice Chairman who traded on audit client inside information more than three hundred times without getting caught by Deloitte’s superior quality and risk management processes. Deloitte is, arguably (after the acquisition of BearingPoint’s public sector business) the top consultant to the US Department of Defense.

One of the more interesting statistics in the report, besides the “complete” list of Deloitte’s public company audit clients as of December 2009, is the statistic regarding the large audit firm litigation expenses.

They blame the game, not the players:

On average, for the large U.S. auditing firms, litigation-related costs are more than 15 percent of the audit-related revenue. That is 40 times higher than the average for all businesses, according to the 2006 Risk and Insurance Management Society Benchmark Survey…The six largest audit firms had 27 pending claims of more than $1 billion as of March 2008, all of them arising from public company audits. It would take only one judgment of that magnitude as to seriously weaken a firm, and because of the magnitude of damage claims, an audit firm may not be able to afford the risk of a loss in court, even when the firm is confident of the quality of its audit and legal position.

Deloitte should know.

Ironic or what?