>One example: accounting scandals in the US are rare. I don't think anyone trusts accounting figures for public companies from India or china.

I work in accounting. You’re right, I trust the US more than India or China, but you’d be surprised at the liberties US companies make and how many individuals from India are auditing their work. Auditors (excluding partners and some senior managers) are just not equipped to deal with the technical accounting concepts and to challenge management. Remember, the company employs the auditors. You certainly don’t want to ruin a $1MM contract for your firm but pressing too hard.

> This is one of the main reasons why companies pay a premium for workers in the west when they could hire from other places.

By this token "other places" companies would also want to pay a premium to hire US workers outside of sheer competency. Yet we're not seeing Samsung massively moving institutional operations to US centers for instance.

> accounting scandals

Whait, what ? You're telling me that while the crypto bubble is bursting and they're going to prison for egregious fraud ?

Also, scandals being few in number would probably be a sign of overcorruption and systematic rot or the controlling structure. I'm not sure that's what we want.

Counterpoint: scihub, libgen links are routinely shared on HN as a matter of course (likewise in academia). I've seen HN threads in which people unapologetically reminisce about torrenting movies/music.

Perhaps your will object: "But the publishers/Disney/etc are evil, greedy entities and I don't owe them anything." But I'm sure anyone who's stolen corporate secret elsewhere can come up with a similar justification in their head! After all, that may well be why they left the company in the first place.