Published on 13 Dec 2023 on GuruFocus.com via Yahoo Finance

Charlie Munger Discusses Daily Journal

I'm Charlie Munger (Trades, Portfolio), Chairman of the Board of the Daily Journal Corporation (NASDAQ:DJCO), and I welcome all of you, including the groupies.Our [new] independent accounting firm is here. We prefer you to our old one. You remind me of my own personal circumstances. They once asked me what one person accounted for most of my personal felicity in life, and I said, That's easy that would be my wife's first husband. You have an ideal position of the same sort.

I'm going to talk briefly on accounting and then I'm not going to talk any more on the subject.

To be as late in publishing an audit as the Daily Journal is absolutely unheard of. It's unbelievable. Had the mafia been running the company with the worst excesses in the world you wouldn't expect an audit to be this late. It set a new record in the history of the world. We obviously had an audit from hell, and the question is, what caused it? Our auditor would say it was our sloppiness in internal controls. God knows, we've had a few imperfections, but in my judgment they were trivial and of no practical consequence to anybody with any sense. The auditors would say that our difficulties were really serious. They were confused by the difficulties of our business, which God knows are confusing and difficult, but that's external reality. They were like the doctor who wants to fix a nose bleed by feeling around in the groin, and charge for it by the hour.