This is from The Times yesterday and is too important not to be shared:
The Financial Reporting Council approved the quality of an audit of Patisserie Valerie's accounts six months before the café chain revealed a £40 million fraud that brought the company to the brink of collapse, The Times has learnt.
The watchdog conducted a review of auditing work on the 2017 accounts of Patisserie Holdings, the parent company, as part of a random sample of businesses whose audits it inspected last spring.
The regulator, whose investigations into the large accountants' work has been criticised as ineffective, gave Grant Thornton's work on the accounts a clean bill of health, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
There can be no doubt that Grant Thornton are in deep water on the Patisserie Valerie audit.
But it not looks like the FRC is digging its own grave, given its future is already seriously in doubt.
The case for absolutely fundamental audit reform has arrived, and it does rather look as though the auditors aren't the people to decide on the issue.
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I agree in principle that management should respond to suspected fraud found by auditors.
However, I think that a lot of so called management these days can be rather corrupt anyway, covering up losses for investors, fiddling tax returns, cutting corners, messing with pension pots etc.
Yes – auditing and accounting as professions have sunk to a new low.
But I also feel that the management profession and our corporate governance itself is in crisis and lower still in moral ethical fibre. It is the management of these auditable institutions that set the whole tone to be honest.
It’s the same old debate of audit failure e.g. in 1990-1992 that culminated in the Cadbury Report. What exactly, does the Left propose: government based auditing? As HMRC for example doesn’t exactly inspire!
Well let’s try the NAO then