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Financial abuse and dementia
Sophie Mass
The general election is now over, and Parliament has more time to deal with matters other than Brexit. The spotlight has therefore returned to corporate governance, with The Sunday Times reporting that the FRC is developing a “British version of Sarbanes-Oxley”. It reported that this would “heap more responsibility on to directors, asking them to vouch regularly for the integrity of their financial controls and – if passed into law in the UK – opening the possibility of criminal proceedings against chief executives and finance directors for reporting misleading statements to the market.”
In November of this year we blogged on the Financial Reporting Council’s (‘FRC’) recently published report ‘Developments in Audit’ and highlighted that the FRC’s review was running in parallel with the Competition and Markets Authority (‘CMA’) review of the sector. As we reported, such extensive review has been triggered following the high-profile collapses of companies such as Carillion and BHS.
The high profile collapses of companies such as Carillion and BHS have reignited the debate about the effectiveness of statutory audit. In the FRC’s recently published report, Developments in Audit, the FRC grapples, not for the first time, with how to ensure that audit properly serves the public interest. Auditors can expect some pretty radical changes.
Earlier last week, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) announced that it had sanctioned PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and its audit partner Steve Denison, in relation to the 2014 audits of BHS and the Taveta Group (Taveta), following an investigation under the FRC’s Accountancy Scheme.
Grant Thornton last week announced that it has decided to opt out of bidding for audit work for FTSE 350 companies, in a move that could ultimately cause a seismic shift in the audit market.
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