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The Oscars Pretty Much Sum Up Everything That Happens In Public Accounting

Who is excited about the Oscars? Certainly not me, I don't watch movies. But whatever, power to the people who do.

Anyway, I came across an article discussing the possibility of Oscar ballots going electronic (you mean to tell me they haven't been up until now?) and found the description of PwC's duty of care to be frighteningly accurate.

Read the following paragraph carefully:

With online voting scheduled to begin in time for the 85th Academy Awards next year, the ceremonial ballot-mailing – in which accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers pretend to sort trays of ballots and partners from the firm pretend to supervise the sorting, with the ballots then being loaded onto a U.S Postal Service truck – may well be replaced by something more private and not nearly as photogenic.

WHAT? You mean no interns pretending to sort trays of ballots and no partners standing there pretending to supervise?! Oh how barbaric!

My guess is that the reporter who wrote the paragraph above doesn't write about accounting very often or else he wouldn't have used a forbidden word like "pretend," which is inappropriate to use in reference to any act performed by an accounting professional. Granted, anyone who actually works in this industry knows full well that "pretend" is actually a very fitting description but that doesn't mean it's ever appropriate to say that out loud.