Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Tax Research UK Blog is written by Richard Murphy unless otherwise stated and published by Tax Research LLP under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Design by Andy Moyle
Bought it yesterday on Kindle. Of course it’s only preaching to the converted.
AH I see. You just left this here so I could greet you :-). I read you every day and often share, very grateful for your work P
Talking of the curse of finance Richard, have you seen the news about Patisserie Valerie yet? The finance director, who just happened to make a £700k profit on selling shares in the company a few months ago, has been arrested for suspected financial irregularities, which include a £20m ‘blackhole’ in the company’s finances.
And there’s also the little matter of HMRC issuing a winding up order against it’s teading subsidiary for unpaid tax of over £1m.
Oh dear.
I hate to ask where the auditors were…..
Were they one of the Big4 by any chance?
I have not checked….no time….
“The critical question is how far back the alleged irregularities extend. A long way, Thursday’s statement by the company seemed to imply. Auditor Grant Thornton signed off the last full-year accounts on 24 November 2017, with net cash reported to be £21.5m at the end of September. The auditor will now to have answer a basic question: what cash-reconciliation checks did it run?” (Nils Pratley, The Guardian, 11/10/18)
Oh yes
Don’t check the bank rec and bluntly nothing else if of any value
In my time with what became KPMG I recall arriving at a client where the bank rec was out by £0.5 million
I decided I could try to help sort it or just call my partner and say we were in deep trouble with this one, and maybe survive the experience as a result
It became me or the company accountant to survive I realised
I did
He did not
They never did sort it
The accounts were qualified on the basis of inadequate books and records
I once did that for one of my clients – who we then got rid of asap
The only times I ever got involved in such debacles
But it makes you wonder what happened here.
It’s been reported the FD has been arrested do looks like fraud
John D, thanks for that. Another day, another audit failure and finance fraud.