Speaking at a JPMorgan investment conference in San Francisco, BearingPoint’s chairman Rod McGeary said, We are auditing 100% of our contracts, we have 9,000 and they have very different flavors and are in different countries. We will audit them first and then hand them over to PwC. The process is likely to further delay the filing of its annual report and McGeary would not be drawn on when it would manage to do this.

McLean, Virginia-based Bearing Point’s woes began in earnest in November 2004 when the company announced that it had made an accounting error, whereby $92.9m had been mistakenly treated as accounts receivable, rather than unbilled revenue.

While only a balance sheet item – which had no effect on the company’s cash position or the profit and loss account – it showed a weakness in its financial controls which was unacceptable for a consultancy giant. CFO Robert Falcone announced his retirement on the day the error was announced – CEO Randolph Blazer had resigned a week earlier.

Further humiliation for the company came in March when it announced that it had missed its deadline with the Securities and Exchange Commission to file its annual financial report, that it would have to restate the financial results of the first three quarters of 2004 and that its internal financial controls regarding Sarbanes Oxley compliance had not been effective.

Former Oracle CFO Harry You was brought in as the new CEO in March and last month it strengthened its balance sheet by raising $200m in convertible debentures.

Asked how he faced customers regarding the irony of its Sarbanes Oxley failures considering that it sells consultancy based on achieving such compliance, McGeary joked, First thing I do is put a towel over my head.

We absolutely made some pretty serious mistakes, he admitted. We did not put internal people on the systems redo [installation of new accounting system]. We got subcontractors to do our systems implementation and we didn’t even put one of our MD’s in charge of our systems implementation, but put an outsider in charge of it.