Substantially respond to the following regarding the Bernie Madoff Fraud:

Bernie Madoff, along with his 2 sons have passed away. One of his sons died from illness and the other took his own life. Bernie's ex-wife has been living quietly after the loss of both her children. David Friehling, the CPA who signed off on Madoff's audit, only got 1 year at a detention center and 1 year of supervised released. Bernie Madoff's brother served his 10 years and now lives quietly in Palm Beach. Frank DiPascali has passed away. Mr. Markopolos, the whistleblower who notified the SEC of Madoff's ponzi scheme, now works as a forensic accounting analyst for the SEC.

Madoff Investment Securities LLC's auditors were Friehling & Horowitz, a small firm in which David Freihling was the firm's sole CPA. Madoff had been their client for over 17 years. David Freihling, CPA, which signed off on the Madoff's audit, had a conflict of interest with his audit client because David Freihling was invested into Madoff's ponzi scheme. An auditor should be conflict free with the entity in which it's auditing. David Freihling should have referred Madoff as a client to someone else instead of continuing auditing them. Freihling & Horowitz was being paid approximately $12,000 to $14,000 a month by Madoff for their audit. This was just greed taking over. Another red flag is the, Freihling & Horowitz was never peer reviewed. During the time in which these events took place, New York didn't require peer reviews every 3 years. This allowed Madoff's scheme to run amok unchecked. If the feeder firm would have conducted their audit properly, the scheme could've definitely been uncovered. Simply by trying to verify and vouch transactions via banks statements to trace back the funds, this scheme would've shed light earlier. Unfortunately, this might continue to happen again because audits are not meant to catch everything and there will always be greed in people. And those people, will always try to find a way to cheat the system and find loopholes.

Original question asked for above response: Bring the Madoff story up to date with events that occurred after the case book went to print. Discuss your thoughts on Madoff's auditor and the lack of awareness any regulators had that such a large company was audited by a sole-practitioner firm. Why did that happen? Could it happen again? Consider that Madoff was a "service provider" to various companies that outsourced investment activities to Madoff. If the auditors of "feeder firms" had adequately investigated Madoff as a third party service provider (formerly covered under SAS 70, now under the attest standards), would the Madoff fraud have been uncovered?