Satyam's band of bottomline brothers
Key players in the gargantuan effort to restate the company’s fraud-ridden accounts recall those days and nights in the trenches
On the evening of September 29, the top management at Mahindra Satyam (formerly Satyam Computer Services) gathered in a conference room at the company headquarters in Hyderabad to unveil the much-awaited financials of the beleaguered company. As the numbers were being announced, in another building on campus, some 200 auditors and accountants gave a standing ovation while watching the proceedings live on TV.
The team could be forgiven that moment of self-congratulation. They had spent many a sleepless — and often hungry — night to ensure that the Satyam accounts were released on schedule. In a way, these were the people that finally exorcised the ghost of scandal that had haunted Satyam ever since founder B Ramalinga Raju admitted to a multi-crore fraud in early January, 2009.
“Throughout the day of September 29, my heart was beating like a sledgehammer. The pressure was felt by everybody. We were fighting a battle, racing against the clock, trying to get everything done within the stipulated time. The day of reckoning had finally arrived,” says S Durgashankar, CFO of Mahindra Satyam.
The account restatement process had been a gargantuan 18-month effort. Besides the 200 from Satyam’s finance, internal audit and IT departments were around 100 forensic investigators and another 100 members of the statutory audit team. It involved collecting 30 terabytes of information (if printed, it would fill 270,000 cupboards), checking over 2 million emails, securing and mining information from over 300 computer hard disks and verifying over 200 bank accounts. “The whole process was not just an intellectual challenge, but a test of physical endurance as well,” recalls Durgashankar.
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May, 2012
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