Jamaica Broilers Group (JBG) executives have raised serious questions about how multiple audit teams failed to detect a massive, multi-year fraud in the company’s United States (US) operations, with Chief Executive Officer Chris Levy pointedly noting the oversight failure as “another question” that needed answering.

The revelation came as the company disclosed that three separate layers of auditors — including those from the US banking syndicate and the group’s own auditors — all gave clean opinions on financial statements that later required $46 billion in adjustments.

“Well, that’s another question,” Levy remarked pointedly when it was noted that his internal team discovered irregularities that the external auditors had missed. His comment underscored the deep concern about comprehensive audit failures in detecting the four-year scheme.

Ian Parsard, senior vice president of finance and corporate planning/executive director, expressed astonishment at the comprehensive failure of oversight systems. “When you have this kind of coordinated and deliberate efforts by the leadership, that’s what makes this difficult,” he told investors at the Mayberry Forum.

“Let me mention three different set of auditors here,” Parsard detailed. “First we had the auditors of the US that for multiple years did not pick up any adverse findings…We have a banking syndicate in the US that is led by one of the top three banks in the US. They have their own auditors that come in and audit the borrowing-based facility that we have… There was no adverse findings from the bank’s auditors. And then of course we have our group auditors that review all of these different audit reports etc. And over all of these years, there has been no adverse findings.”

The fraud, which involved hiding costs in biological assets and inventory accounts while understating vendor financing, eventually came to light not through formal audit processes, but through a whistleblower who pointed investigators in the right direction.

Levy revealed that the company had already been suspicious because of the disconnect between reported profits and actual cash generation, but the sophisticated nature of the scheme made it difficult to uncover through conventional means.

“So that’s the difficulty,” Parsard emphasised, “When you have this kind of coordinated effort to be able to uncover it very quickly, it’s not very easy.”

The company has since taken drastic measures to overhaul its financial oversight, including replacing its entire US accounting team, changing auditors and implementing new controls with the help of IBM. The new auditors, according to Parsard, have specific poultry industry experience and “know where to look” for irregularities that their predecessors missed.

The admission raises broader questions about audit effectiveness in complex, multi-jurisdictional companies and highlights how determined management can potentially circumvent even multiple layers of financial oversight. For JBG, the comprehensive audit failure has proven devastating, requiring a complete restructuring of the company’s financial position and damaging shareholder confidence.