[altacc]

The accounting firms' motivation is profit, which they derive from the customers they are auditing, so they have an incentive to be favourable to their clients. If you want to be kind to them you can call it an unconscious bias. There have been a few scandals uncovered where an accounting firm audited and approved a company which soon after went bankrupt due to bad or corrupt accounting. For example Carillion, VBS Bank & Enron.

They are also drinking the same Kool-Aid as most other people in the industry, that all this is above board and fine. There's a lot of group-thinking, and not as much objective analysis as is needed.

The blindness extends to management and the board, who all want the company to be successful. Good financial numbers are questioned a lot less than bad ones.