text: Owning it. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the auditing firm that handles the Oscars votes, said that they didn’t act “quickly enough” to fix the epic Best Picture flub at the 89th annual Academy Awards on Sunday, February 26. 
   
   “PwC takes full responsibility for the series of mistakes and breaches of established protocols during last night’s Oscars,” the company wrote in a statement, released late Monday, February 27, hours after they apologized for the gaffe in another earlier statement. 
   
   According to PwC, their partner Brian Cullinan accidentally handed presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway the envelope containing the winner of Best Actress, which was La La Land’s Emma Stone. After realizing their error, Beatty, 79, explained to the audience and viewers at home, "I opened the envelope and it said, 'Emma Stone, La La Land.' That's why I took such a long look at Faye. … I wasn't trying to be funny." 
   
   Eddy Chen/ABC via Getty Images 
   
   In their statement, PwC apologized for the way they handled the situation. “Once the error occurred, protocols for correcting it were not followed through quickly enough by Mr. Cullinan or his partner,” the statement continued. 
   
   The company also expressed remorse for those roped into the snafu, including Beatty, Dunaway, 76, and host Jimmy Kimmel, as well as the casts of La La Land and Moonlight. 
   
   “We wish to extend our deepest gratitude to each of them for the graciousness they displayed during such a difficult moment,” the statement said. “For the past 83 years, the Academy has entrusted PwC with the integrity of the awards process during the ceremony, and last night we failed the Academy.” 
   
   Tim Ryan, PwC’s U.S. chairman and senior partner, addressed the drama during an interview with Variety on Monday. “We clearly made a mistake, and once the mistake was made, we corrected it and owned up to it,” he said, adding that Cullinan “feels very, very terrible and horrible” about the mix-up. 
   
   “He is very upset about this mistake,” Ryan added. “And as a firm, given that he is a partner of our firm, it is also my mistake and our mistake, and we all feel very bad.” 
   
   Want stories like these delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up now for the Us Weekly newsletter! ||||| One of two accounting honchos in charge of handing out the winners’ envelopes at the Oscars Sunday night jinxed himself in an interview earlier this month. 
   
   “It doesn’t sound very complicated, but you have to make sure you give the presenter the right envelope,” Brian Cullinan, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, told the website Medium in a story published Feb. 10. 
   
   “We check things dozens of times, recounts and double-checks,” Cullinan said. “We’ll have staff go back two and three times to make sure, and then [PWC partner] Martha [Ruiz] and I will review and recount to ensure there are no differences between what we have and they had. So far, there’s never been a problem.” 
   
   Cullinan was standing stage right during the ceremony holding a briefcase that contained the 24 envelopes of the winners. His PWC partner, Martha Ruiz, was stage left holding another briefcase with an identical set of envelopes. The pair would take turns handing them out to presenters as they alternately took the stage from either side. 
   
   For the final award — Best Picture — presenter Warren Beatty entered from stage right, Cullinan’s side. 
   
   Only Beatty was given the wrong envelope, a monumental flub that led to the incorrect winner being named. 
   
   Before the glaring glitch, Cullinan had posted scores of photos taken backstage at the Oscars. 
   
   After his bosses at PWC issued a mea culpa for the company’s mistake, all of his Oscar night tweets were scrubbed. ||||| Accountant Brian Cullinan was told not to use social media during the Oscars — despite tweeting a photo of Emma Stone just moments before handing Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway the wrong envelope for Best Picture, PEOPLE has confirmed. 
   
   In the now-deleted tweet, Cullinan – one of two accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers who handled the Oscars balloting – shared a photo of the Best Actress winner smiling while holding her award backstage. The time stamp shows it was posted at 9:05 p.m., only minutes before the Best Picture blunder occurred. 
   
   “Brian was asked not to tweet or use social media during the show,” a source tells PEOPLE. “He was fine to tweet before he arrived at the red carpet but once he was under the auspices of the Oscar night job, that was to be his only focus.” 
   
   The source continued, “Tweeting right before the Best Picture category was announced was not something that should have happened.” 
   
   The source added that it’s unclear whether the Academy will end its 83-year relationship with the accounting firm after the mix-up. 
   
   “The Academy has launched a full-scale review of its relationship with PwC but it is very complicated,” the source said. “Vote-tallying and the Oscar night job is just one part of what PwC does with the Academy. It is too early to say how this will play out but everyone is of course taking it very very seriously.” 
   
   Christopher Polk/Getty 
   
   Cullinan has not publicly commented or posted on his Twitter account since the blunder, although his PwC partner Martha Ruiz shared a selfie from the red carpet with Cullinan and Michael Strahan after the accounting firm took responsibility for the error. 
   
   PwC, the accounting firm that counts and delivers the winning Oscars envelopes, has publicly taken the blame for the incident in which La La Land was called as the Best Picture winner over the actual honoree, Moonlight. It confirmed that Cullinan mistakenly handed the presenters the duplicate Best Actress envelope instead of the Best Picture. 
   
   Cullinan and Martha Ruiz were the representatives from PwC tasked with figuring out the Oscar winners and bringing the sealed envelopes containing the well-guarded secrets to the awards show. Two PwC staffers previously told MarketWatch that for security, there are “two briefcases, that are identical, and we have two entire sets of winning envelopes.” 
   
   During the show, the two take their places on opposite sides of the stage, handing presenters their cards (depending on which side they enter from). 
   
   On top of admitting fault in the error, PwC also said that Cullinan and Ruiz did not follow protocol for correcting the error “quickly enough.” They only appeared onstage after multiple La La Land creators gave speeches – more than two minutes after La La Land was incorrectly named the winner. 
   
   Ahead of the show, both Ruiz and Cullinan seemed assured that no mistake of that kind would be made. 
   
   Cullinan told The Huffington Post before the ceremony that if a wrong winner were to be called, “We would make sure that the correct person was known very quickly. Whether that entails stopping the show, us walking onstage, us signaling to the stage manager — that’s really a game-time decision, if something like that were to happen. ” 
   
   He added, “Again, it’s so unlikely.” ||||| The PriceWaterhouseCoopers auditors responsible for the biggest fiasco in Oscars history had previously boasted that their 83-year-old contract had never come up for tender because they "always" do a good job, it has emerged. 
   
   Brian Cullinan, one of the only two people in the world supposed to know the Oscar winners before the ceremony, had said: “It’s such a long-term relationship that we know intricately how everything works, the timing of it, the process that we use, and they have absolute trust in us and what we do.” 
   
   But that relationship could be in doubt for the first time today, after executives were seen in crisis meetings following an on-stage catastrophe in which La La Land was mistakenly... ||||| As of mid-Tuesday, officials at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were still reviewing Sunday night’s Oscar debacle, when La La Land was mistakenly announced as Best Picture instead of Moonlight, and they were still considering possible fixes. An Academy spokeswoman declined to discuss the next steps. But people briefed on the matter dropped some hints. One change, according to a person familiar with the discussions, would involve stationing two auditors — from PricewaterhouseCoopers or otherwise — at each stage entrance, rather than one on each side, as was done until now. 
   
   The extra auditor would act as a fail-safe, presumably keeping anyone from handing presenters the wrong envelope, as happened to Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway on Sunday. According to this person, the present two-auditor system — under which each holds a duplicate set of envelopes on each side of the stage — is designed not so much for safety as convenience: Presenters may enter from left or right, and the idea has been to have envelopes available on both sides. 
   
   Another person said Academy officials are looking hard at the Emma Stone tweet posted by PwC auditor Brian Cullinan just before Dunaway announced the wrong winner onstage. The review, which has been a nonstop process since Sunday night, should make clear whether there was indeed a policy violation, and, if so, what might be done about it. 
   
   Increasingly, Sunday’s last-minute breakdown looks like a compound fracture. An auditor handed off the wrong envelope. Beatty mulled it, then passed it to Dunaway, who proclaimed La La Land the winner without accounting for the announcement’s mention of best actress Stone. Those involved conferred while the announcement and mistaken thank-yous proceeded. No producer halted the process by stepping on-camera or having someone in the booth call a halt. The host, Jimmy Kimmel, was not immediately available to intervene; he was prepping a last-minute coda involving his faux nemesis Matt Damon. In the end, no one looked good.
target: – The PwC accountant whose backstage tweet may have distracted him enough to cause the biggest flub in Oscars history was specifically asked not to tweet during the awards show, a source tells People. "Brian [Cullinan] was asked not to tweet or use social media during the show. He was fine to tweet before he arrived at the red carpet, but once he was under the auspices of the Oscar night job, that was to be his only focus," the source says. "Tweeting right before the Best Picture category was announced was not something that should have happened." The tweet in question, along with others from backstage, have since been deleted. PwC said in a statement Monday night that "once the error occurred, protocols for correcting it were not followed through quickly enough by Mr. Cullinan or his partner," per Us. Meanwhile, the Academy continues to investigate the incident and its relationship with PwC; the Telegraph reports the accounting firm is in "crisis meetings" with the Academy in an attempt to salvage the 83-year-long relationship between the two. Sources tell Deadline one possible change being discussed is adding two more PwC auditors backstage, one on each side of the stage, so that the extra auditor could act as a fail-safe in case the first auditor hands a presenter the wrong envelope again. As for whether the Academy might sever its relationship with PwC entirely, a source tells People the issue is "very complicated" because "vote-tallying and the Oscar night job is just one part of what PwC does with the Academy." Page Six points out that, in an interview earlier this month, Cullinan had noted, "It doesn’t sound very complicated, but you have to make sure you give the presenter the right envelope."