Sunday, November 22, 2009

I can't imagine

I am signed up for several Google alerts relating to auditing and audits. One such alert recently took me on an interesting journey. The original alert took me to this website (?) blog (?) about the findings of an auditor in Zimbabwe. According to the About Us page, "Zimbabwe Metro online (zimbabwemetro.com) is an aggregated web log that covers a wide-range of topics, including sections devoted to politics, entertainment, media, lifestyle and business.We also feature hyperlinks to various news sources and columnists. Our roster of bloggers includes many people from Zimbabwe’s politicians to our extensive network of prominent writers. We are ranked the most most visited news weblog on Zimbabwe News by Alexa Internet."

Intrigued that an auditor would be exposing government corruption to such a degree, I tried to do some research. Using the NY Times search function I discovered an interesting archive of news stories about Zimbabwe. It seems that the president of Zimbabwe won a run off election and was inaugurated to his sixth term in June 2008. His opponent withdrew from the race because "state-sponsored enforcers were beating and killing his followers." More recent articles document a cholera epidemic and devastating economic and agricultural policies that leave the population starving. In February 2009, the president's opponent was sworn in as the prime minister to try and bring unity to the government. And just yesterday President Obama presented the 2009 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award to publicly recognize Women of Zimbabwe Arise, or Woza, a grassroots effort to speak out against injustice in the country.

And in all of this an auditor is operating. I tried to search for a website for the auditor or the audit but was unsuccessful.

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