As the country slowly awakens from an induced economic coma, it faces harsh new realities of gargantuan corporate bailouts and a profoundly bloated public debt. Now more than ever we need corporate accounting to faithfully represent underlying business performance – or the public will find its bailouts are squandered and the current low trust in […]
Covid-19 has upended us all. The government is desperate for ventilators and masks, amongst other critical equipment. Businesses are desperate for liquidity. Under these conditions, it is easy for both to enter into bad contracts. We saw this movie about ten years ago, during the response to the 2008-09 financial crisis. So what lessons can […]
Britain has just released two bold and damning reviews on the Big Four oligopoly in auditing. Amongst the highlights of these reports, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has called for a ring-fencing of the firms’ audit practices from their consulting businesses and for dual audits of large companies by Big Four and non-Big Four […]
Auditors are in the business of trust. But in the last year alone, PwC has been banned in India, Deloitte is being investigated in South Africa, several KPMG partners have been criminally charged in the US, and EY has been fined in the UK. The ostensive watchdogs of market disclosure have become poster boys for […]
Britain is reeling from the meltdown of one of its largest public contractors – Carillion. The multi-billion-pound collapse has brought to light the extraordinary mess that is modern corporate auditing. We now know that Carillion was billed tens of millions by the so-called “Big Four” audit firms – Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC. With so […]
