PwC Faces Fall-Out From Oscar Night Flub

Confusion reigned at the Academy Motion Picture Art and Sciences awards on Sunday night as Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, the duo who appeared together in the iconic film, “Bonnie and Clyde” 50 years ago, initially announced the winner of the Best Picture as “La La Land,” only to backtrack minutes later. “Moonlight” was then announced as the actual winner.

Red faces were everywhere, and there was a lot of finger pointing in the aftermath, but PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the giant accounting firm responsible for tabulating and distributing the results, has fallen on its sword. The firm acknowledged on Monday that it was the main culprit in the mishap.

“At the end of the day we made a human error,” Tim Ryan, U.S. chairman and senior partner of PwC said to USA TODAY. “We made a mistake. What happened was, our partner on the left side of the stage…handed the wrong envelope to (actor) Warren Beatty. And then the second we realized that we notified the appropriate parties and corrected the mistake.”

According to various media reports, the accountant who passed along the wrong envelope was tweeting throughout the ceremony and had posted photos of Best Actress winner Emma Stone immediately before the hand-off. He is an established professional with a career spanning 30 years.

As is usually the case, the pair of PwC accountants was shown on TV walking down the red carpet before the event, carrying the results in locked briefcases. PwC has been monitoring the distribution of the Oscars for 83 years. The mammoth flub was witnessed on live TV by almost 33 million TV viewers and who knows how many more have seen it over the Internet.

What will this mean for PwC and the accounting profession as a whole? Unless you subscribe to the theory that any publicity is good publicity, the news for PwC, at least in the short-term, isn’t positive.

Accounting firms are supposed to operate seamlessly in the background and this goof has pushed the firm to the foreground. It has damaged a reputation that has taken decades to burnish and the stigma from such a highly-publicized mistake is likely to linger. While the error isn’t related to the usual type of accounting services, that won’t matter. Not to mention that PwC will continue to be the butt of jokes for the foreseeable future.

Will clients look at other CPAs differently due to the Oscar fiasco? Probably not, although you may have to put up with some occasional barbs or snide references. As long as you continue to provide high-quality services, however, you should still garner rave reviews for your performance.