> And why did they need outside help to figure out what was going on? I smell rats on both sides of this equation.
I can see two possibilities (which aren't mutually exclusive) here
1) They no longer had the skills in-house to investigate and resolve the issues they'd encountered.
2) Because it related to their year-end filings, they wanted an independent 3rd party to investigate so that they'd have an "independent" outfit to verify the issue if the taxman, share-holders or anyone else came knocking
Neither sounds too unlikely or unreasonable to me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
