Auditor rotation: the new merry-go-round

Prem Sikka

From Prof. Prem Sikka, via email:

“Auditing itself has become one of the biggest frauds of modern times. When was the last time company auditors drew attention to fiddles, tax dodging, money laundering or their own complicity in financial misdemeanours? The penalties for delivering duff audits, as demonstrated by the banking crash, are virtually non-existent. Instead of any fundamental reforms there are plenty of gestures about tweaking audit reports and now changing auditors, in effect a merry-go-round among the big accounting firms.”

We’d tend to agree. Read the details in Sikka’s new article at The Conversation, entitled Scandals and regulation lead to an auditing merry-go-round.

More from Prem Sikka:

“A Celebration of Anthony Lowe and The Sheffield School”, University of Sheffield (UK), 3 June 2015. Book your free place here.

Should Nation States ‘Compete’? A Research Workshop organised by Tax Justice Network, AABA and City University, at City University, London, 25-26 June 2015. Book your place here.

Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) Network Annual Conference, London School of Economics, 2-4 July 2014. Details are here.  

BOOKS. 

“How Corrupt is Britain?” has been published by Pluto. The authors include Sikka, TJN’s John Christensen, and a number of others. The book has been described as “a ground-changing book” by The Guardian newspaper.

“What the three main [UK] parties aren’t telling you: A radical way out of inequality and stagnation” has been published by Searching Finance. Sikka is one of several authors.

“Fighting Corporate Abuse: Beyond Predatory Capitalism” published by Pluto. Analysing corporate abuses and offering public policies for tackling them.

As always, there is more on the website of the Association for Accountancy and Business Affairs