When was there ever so concentrated a burst of public speculation on “which Big 4 audit firm is the next to fail”?
Within a single week, Accountancy Age predicted it would be Ernst & Young; in the blogosphere, Francine McKenna’s wager with Dennis Howlett fingered her ex-employer and bête noire, PwC; and ProPublica reached into the remains of the second tier to round on McGladrey and BDO.
All for very serious reasons, ample to cause sleepless nights among the profession’s leaders. But the voyeuristic speculation as to “which one” is a pointless and mis-directed exercise, because each of these firms – but also Deloitte and KPMG, and Grants too, for good measure – faces multiple overhanging threats on a mortal scale.
All the chambers are loaded in this losers’ game of Russian roulette. So it is an unanswerable question, where the weapon may be pointing when the hammer falls next. It’s also an irrelevant query, too – because it depends entirely on the judges’ docket management on Parmalat, Satyam, New Century, AIG, Bankest, Refco, Sentinel, the Madoff feeders and all the other ticking time bombs.
Instead, the real question should be, “What next?”
On this, for grown-up dialog to occur, two fundamental misconceptions – both lurking in the Accountancy Age article – have to be killed off, once-for-all:
The first is that the large firms’ survival will somehow be assured by government, on the assertion that global-scale companies “will invariably have a legal requirement for an audit.”
If there is any logic here, it is seriously inverted. The regulators long ago conceded that they would be powerless to stop the disintegration of a large firm that reached a tipping point – here and here. Further, when that next step takes down the other three, and unravels the entire suppliers’ market, legislative mandates that there be audits would be as futile as a requirement that all trains be hauled by steam locomotives. No more suppliers: no delivery. Period.
The second fallacy, conspicuous even in an article that displays a truly stunning lack of comprehension of the profession’s structural issues, is that a Big Three would survive the loss of a fourth.
Won’t happen. The uneven concentrations of industry expertise around the world’s large economies, the politically-imposed constraints on auditor choice, and the post-Andersen fragility of the international networks are alone sufficient to show that the Big Four are already down to an irreducible tipping point. One more, and they all go.
While no insider will say so in public, senior risk managers acknowledge that in the coming turmoil of another Big Four failure, the prospect that three survivors would stay in today’s business by accepting further concentration of exposure and liability will be untenable.
That a fundamental re-structuring of the profession will occur is beyond debate – and is nothing new – although answers will only lie in the readiness of all interested parties to get past the posturing to offer constructive, achievable solutions.
Trouble is, none of the critics have either the vision or the authority to lead. There is no available government intervention, to “save” a privately-capitalized Big Four partnership once slipped into a death spiral – here. Nor can the large firms’ collective survival be enabled by statutory requirements that there be audits; if a firm goes down and takes the others, it is as futile as King Canute’s attempt to order the tides, to require delivery of an audit report when the providers are all out of business.
The only alternative to a highly-disruptive disintegration of the large firm networks – and a long shot wager indeed, requiring the most wild optimism to imagine – would be the emergence of Big Four leadership prepared to engage, for the sake of their future, in the “creative destruction” brought forward in 1942 by economist Joseph Schumpeter:
• To forswear the currently outmoded auditors’ report, which provides no value to the market and is toxic to the sustainability of the firms’ business model.
• To cut to the heart of the critics’ animosity, by the deep finesse of voluntarily turning the task of issuing low-value “compliance assurance” over to nationalized agencies.
• To allow the capital and investor markets to ascribe to “compliance audits,” performed by huge cadres of conscripted civil servants, the nominal value they would deserve.
• To empower the surviving firms to invent, sell and deliver new forms of assurance that companies will buy, and the markets will pay for, under sustainable limits on liability and free of the life-threatening legal exposures as wielded by the class action plaintiffs.
• To break the antiquated shackles of the compliance-driven limitations of “independence,” so as to build or acquire whatever professional services capabilities may be congruent with the new forms of assurance – whether in systems or technology consulting, finance, law or otherwise.
Starting down such a road would require envisioning an entirely new set of directions for the profession – beginning with the acknowledgment that the current race is going around a one-way track to a dead end.
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