Of course, these critics also admit that scores of corporate managers in Indonesia have gotten exceedingly good at hiding sensitive transactions from auditors. This is put on the company's books as a cash deposit. But if the borrower defaults, the bank does not give the first company its deposit back. Still, Haryanto Sahari, a partner with the local affiliate of Price-waterhouseCoopers, argues that accountants cannot rely solely on the word of corporate clients when preparing audits. So Vulgar Foreign bankers now say something hasn't been right with Indonesian audits for years.
Accountants tend to give a more tempered view, however.
Still, I can't close my eyes to the possibility that there were mis-audits. Siddharta recalls one company director who told her unabashedly that some of his documentation was inaccurate. He then went on to ask her if she could fix the accounts to conceal it. It was so vulgar. Even honest auditors in Indonesia say they sometimes have trouble keeping up with the workload, which skyrocketed with the boom years of the 1990s.