It’s not individual auditors, or even individual audit firms. Instead it is the lack of real appetite to address the conflicts of interest that are ingrained in the big four players and which are the root cause of the lack of true competition in the industry. There is a vacancy for the chair of the new regulator. I recently stepped off the board of Grant Thornton UK, one of the three “challenger audit firms”, after a decade as an independent non-executive, the past five as its chair. So I’ve witnessed first-hand the commonality of interest among Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC — often

Source: The Times August 03, 2021 14:15 UTC