Whatever happened to Deloitte & Touche?

It used to be one of the "Big Eight" accounting firms back in the day.  It may still be.  But, my Lord, how do they explain the raft of negative stories?

When it comes to their basic service of auditing, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board found problems in 12 of the 51 audits performed by the firm that the board inspected and in one other audit in which the firm was involved.  

Their IT department may be even worse.  Massachusetts just fired the firm for falling behind on a $114 million tax-system overhaul mired in errors and the state's unemployed may soon be up in arms at the crappy unemployment system built by Deloitte; it's two years late and $6,000,000 over budget.  This incompetence is not new.  Miami-Dade County fired the firm in 2009 after paying Deloitte $30 million and having “virtually nothing” usable they could rescue.  The county built the system themselves on time and within budget.

California has spent $540,000,000 with Deloitte in the past ten years despite the firm's atrocious record within the state.  The Department of Developmental Services decided that a computer system to track the cost of therapy, transportation and other services for 240,000 disabled Californians didn't work as needed and canceled the project after paying Deloitte $5.7 million. The Department of Industrial Relations hired them to computerize its monitoring system for workers' compensation claims. The project was eventually completed at twice the $24 million budget.  This past March the state finally killed a project to link every court computer in the state after having paid Deloitte $310,000,000 for a contract that was initially bid at $33 million.

Maybe their success at winning contracts is due to lobbying, as they have spent more on influencing legislators than any other competing firm in their field.