There have been repeated examples of the accounts of public companies being fraudulent in recent years. Wirecard was probably the latest and biggest example. I have seen examples of such misdeeds twice in my investment career in my own holdings although losses have been minimal in both cases, the last example being Patisserie (£95 million missing from their accounts). But I have avoided a lot of others where the losses to some investors have been enormous. There have simply been too many such cases for investors to avoid them all however careful you are in analysing the accounts of companies. There can often be hints that something is wrong, but in many cases the fraud is so well concealed it is very difficult to detect. In both the examples I mention, the cash that was claimed to be on the balance sheet was not there, which should be a simple thing for auditors to verify.
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC)) have announced that they are tightening up the rules followed by auditors to impose more responsibility on them for detecting fraud. In the past it was unclear that auditors had any responsibility to detect fraud and some have even denied it.
The FRC claim they are making the auditor’s obligations clearer – specifically to try and identify fraud. The FRC is running a public consultation on the proposed new audit standard which you can read about here: https://www.frc.org.uk/news/october-2020/consultation-on-revised-auditing-standard-for-the
It makes for interesting reading and it actually spells out the kind of problems that auditors should be looking for. In general the proposed changes to the audit standard make sense.
Will it solve the problem of too many frauds altogether? No for three reasons:
- Because audit work is bid for by audit firms, while companies pay their fees, there is a strong incentive by both parties to keep the cost of the audit as low as possible. This brings pressure to bear to not do more work than is absolutely necessary.
- Auditors cannot challenge management too much if they are going to retain the audit brief, and there is a tendency to build a cosy trusting relationship.
- Auditors are protected from being sued by shareholders for incompetence by the Caparo legal judgement, and their liability even to the company can be undermined by the contracts they require signing. In other words, the legal framework under which they operate enables them to escape responsibility for incompetence.
How might these problems be solved? It has been suggested that auditors be appointed by an independent body rather than by the directors of a company. Perhaps another solution might be to set up an independent fund that rewards auditors when they identify and report fraud, with big bonuses for the individuals that do so. That would give them a strong financial incentive to discover it.
That would provide a carrot. But the stick needs to be change in the regulatory framework and the law so that auditors cannot escape financial penalties when they do not do a competent job. A simple change would be to require audit contracts to be based on a standard set by an independent body such as the FRC and not written by auditors as at present.
I hope readers will respond positively to the consultation because I can see many objections from audit firms to the imposition of new obligations, however reasonable they appear to investors.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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