“Fire the auditor!” Three words that Quantum CFO Mike Dodson vowed would never cross his lips were now being spoken aloud by Quantum’s board.

“Fire these guys!” was the message that Dodson received after weeks of personally rejecting the notion.  

“We had been delisted, we were in the middle of a multiyear restatement, and there were lender issues,” recalls Dodson, listing the action items that needed to be addressed to regain credibility with Quantum’s investors and lenders.

“In the middle of all of this, the last thing that you want to do is to fire the auditor and start over,” observes Dodson, while summoning up past experiences that seemed to counter the logic behind dismissing Quantum’s auditor.

“I was sticking to my guns,” reports Dodson, who, along with Quantum’s chief accountant, doubled back in hope of getting deeper insight into the auditor’s progress or lack of it.

“It just started to feel like we were taking two steps forward and three steps back—I remember thinking that we were not getting any buy-in from the auditor on what approach to use with regard to how we were going to get things done,” continues Dodson, who adds that the restatement involved tens of thousands of transactions that went back several years.

“Firing the auditor was against everything that I had believed up until that point,” says Dodson, who recalls having a shared moment of insight with his chief accountant when they repeated back and forth to one another: “We are going to fire the auditor.”

Concludes Dodson: “This was a defining moment for the company, and it became a lifesaver that made the difference in the entire process.” –Jack Sweeney

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