PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has been banned from auditing any firm listed in Indian by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). The 2-year ban was announced on January 10th despite the fact they are one of the big four accounting firms. They failed to see accounting fraud worth $1.7 bln at IT services company Satyam Computer Services.

The fraud scandal erupted at Satyam on Jan. 7, 2009, and their chairman at the time, Byrraju Ramalinga Raju, admitted he was guilty of over exaggerating the cash balance of the company by $1.7 bln, and he was helped to do this by the PwC auditors. The victims from this are Satyam’s shareholders who may have lost as much as $2.2 bln in stock value.

Glaring anomalies were not picked up by independent guarantors, and 7,561 fake invoices were found which made the company look like it had 94 percent more revenue that actually had. Two days after the scandal broke (Jan, 9th, 2009), a computer programmer called Satoshi Nakamoto launched his ground-breaking Blockchain network, and the first Bitcoin cryptocurrency went into the circulation.

Nakamoto’s Blockchain technology can prevent fraud, and the idea was first suggested by Professor Yuir Ijiri, in 1989. It became the first working triple-entry accounting system anywhere in the world, and Blockchain verifies and keeps a record of transactions, as well as being resistant to modification and alteration.