Re:Balance -- Jim Peterson

Re-Engineering Big Audit -- Cautions From The Supply Side

Judge: “I’ve listened to you for an hour, and I’m none the wiser.”

Barrister: “None the wiser, perhaps, my lord, but certainly better informed.”

           -- F.E. Smith, First Earl of Birkenhead (1872-1930)

This series continues, on the proposals floated in London that, as claimed by the proponents, would address issues of quality and competition in the Big Audit market.

The advocacy is vigorous: papers released by the profession’s regulator, the FRC and the nation’s competition authority, the CMA; and a position by a UK government ministry. Proposals include splitting up the Big Four, forcing them to divest their non-audit services, mandating joint appointments, and even turning over the auditor evaluation and selection process to official authority, with the declared intent to reduce the Big Four’s dominant market share of the FTSE 350 down to 80% or even 60%.

Leaders of both KPMG and Deloitte have taken positions that no ancillary work be done for audit clients except as part of the audit. Will such a pre-emptive shift persuade the aggressive critics, or merely be chum for the sharks? Time will tell, and soon enough; although the Financial Reporting Council as the UK's audit regulator is effectively sidelined in the discussion, with the announced departure of its chief executive Stephen Haddrill, the inquiries fast-tracked by Andrew Tyrie at the CMA and City grandee Sir John Kingman are sprinting to their intended yearend conclusions.

Postings here on September 25 and October 8, October 16 and October 24 aimed to bring reality to bear, starting with a graphic illustration of the actual details of the market. With what measure of success? Only to say that the longer the official hand wringing continues, uninformed by attention to the hard facts, the more likely will be the deep and fundamentally harmful effects.

Here a step back, to consider the supply-side.

For context, the 2018 results: First out of the gate was EY on September 13, with global revenue of $ 34.8 billion, Assurance growth of 4.4%, and Advisory and Transactions chalking up 10.1% and 13.9%. Deloitte followed on September 18, muscling its leading position up to a global $ 43.2 billion, with Consulting growing at 15.7% and Audit at 7.7%. On October 1, PwC kept its second spot at a global $ 41.3 billion, with its Audit growing at 4% and Advisory at 10%. KPMG, typically reporting near the year-end, is expected to remain a trailing fourth.

To visualize how completely the Big Four's massive numbers overwhelm the rest, here from the International Accounting Bulletin are the 23 largest networks by 2017 revenues ($ millions):

Deloitte	38,800	Grants	5,005	Kreston	2,262	RussellBfd	460
PwC	37,680	Crowe	3,813	Mazars	1,680	MGI	429
EY	31,404	Nexia	3,620	PKF Int	1,298	ECOVIS	375
KPMG	26,400	BakerTilly	3,400	UHY	540	ShWing	361
BDO	8,133	MooreSte	2,909	SFAI	524	EC&CS	207
RSM	5,095	HLB Int	2,369	PanChi	464

The trend carries forward for another year -- audit practices continuing to lag consulting, with revenues essentially stagnant save for the effects of fee increases and perhaps uplifts for incremental expansion of work done to issue the standard “pass/fail” report.

That cannot be a surprise. In the FTSE 350 sector where the regulators’ agita is burbling, both the sector itself and movement of clients between auditors are basically zero-sum. That is, since by definition the number of engagements is fixed and constant, acquisition of a FTSE 350 engagement by one firm – Big Four or otherwise -- necessarily means its loss by one of the Big Four.

Where then, would a small firm go, as either a successfully tendering newcomer or as beneficiary of government-coerced market re-allocation, to acquire the necessary qualifications? Neither a losing incumbent Big Four firm nor its experienced although now-redundant engagement team would have any reason to find a migration attractive.

Instead, a larger firm will re-deploy its personnel, through the inevitable effects of retirements, relocations, out-placement and other turnover. Even if a Big Four team could be enticed to move – although with what inducements to “trade down” would take some persuasion – a shifting of bodies, desks and telephone numbers would have no impact on the level of performance quality or actual quantum of competition.

Nor could the newly challenged small firm expect to raid elsewhere. There would be no obvious incentive for team leaders at the other large firms to give up the stability and perquisites of a secure Big Four position, to be lured into the disruption and uncertainty of a supplicant seeking a seat at the big table.

Neither are experienced Big Four partners, capable of leading complex large-company engagements, sitting idly in wait to be poached. The next generation of once and future expertise is developed over a full cycle – staff to senior to manager to partner – with massive efforts of time, training and experience, and through a winnowing process against demanding standards.

The FRC, if it survives, or any other agency that would presume to judge and compare the qualifications of smaller firms to assume the audit of a company of global scale should, then, be able and ready to pose these questions early in its evaluations:

• “As you have never audited a company of this size in this sector, what expertise do you actually have in place today, by which to understand what your staffing and other needs would be?”

• “Assuming you can answer that question, from what sources do you expect to grow, hire or otherwise obtain the personnel and expertise that this engagement will require and that you presently lack?”

Regulators hubristic enough to believe themselves competent to conduct that inquiry would well consider the Dunning-Kruger effect -- that the lower one’s qualifications in an area demanding expertise, the less able to judge both one’s own ability and that of those being assessed, and the more likely are serious errors based on misplaced over-confidence.

Better, they would heed the late William McDonough, first chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in the US. Asked in 2005 what the authorities would do in the event of another Big Four failure, he said:

            “None of us has a clue.”

 

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Up-Date from the UK Audit Regulator: The FRC’s Skipper Jumps Ship

Stephen Haddrill, beleaguered chief executive of the Financial Reporting Council, the audit regulator in the United Kingdom, is reportedly to debark by the end of the year.

No surprise. Haddrill has been a marked man since early this year, his agency targeted in Parliament as “toothless”, “useless” and “ineffective” amid an outbreak of outrage over the collapse of the construction group Carillion, the massive hole revealed in the pension fund of BhS with its collapse post-sale for £ 1 by Sir Philip Green, and its own endless inquiry into HBOS.

A raging tempest of official inquiries into the provision of financial statement assurance for large public companies extends to both the market-dominating position of the Big Four – Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC – who collectively audit all of the FTSE 100 and 97% of the FTSE 350, and the structure and efficacy of their oversight.

“Thrown under the bus” would be apt.

Or – to provide historical perspective for those curious about the inevitable back-story -- consider that the modern audit function was invented in the Victorian era, while ships of Her Majesty’s navy were enforcing Pax Britannica by flying the Union Jack around the globe. To invoke the nautical metaphors:

• Is Haddrill making his jump ahead of an inevitable walk of the plank or swing from a yardarm?
• Is he merely the first rodent to debark a leaky and sinking ship?
• Are the FRC’s own proposed “solutions” yet further exercises in re-arranging the Titanic’s deck chairs?
• Or is Haddrill just an earnest but hapless cabin boy, while a mess of squabbling brass-hats blithely sail toward the rocks while resolutely steering by the wake?

If none of these will serve, perhaps the sardonic observation of Voltaire’s Pangloss, that it may be necessary to shoot the occasional admiral, “Pour encourager les autres.”

That is because the degree of justifiable criticism and public distress over the fitness for purpose of the current Big Audit model remains unmatched by clear-eyed awareness of the lack of either achievability or beneficial impact on the perceived issues.

That is, concerns over market competition, concentration and audit quality have elicited a “wish list” that includes splitting up the Big Four, forcing them to divest their non-audit services, mandating joint appointments, turning over the auditor evaluation and selection process to official authority, and even forcing reduction of the Big Four’s dominant market share.

But as examined here in an on-going series begun last month, there is nothing good that can come of any of these, but only disruptive and ineffective adverse consequences. Nor will poor Stephen Haddrill’s rowing away into the sunset have any good effect at all.

 

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Regulators' Re-Work of Big Audit? – “Joint Audit” Is Another Non-Starter

Today’s topic is “joint auditors for large companies” – continuing a series from September 25 through October 8 and October 16, on the issues involving Big Audit that confront the regulators and politicians in the United Kingdom who seem determined to impose disruptive change.

Along with cultivation of smaller firm participation, proposals reflected in papers issued by the Financial Reporting Council and the Competition & Markets Authority and political pronouncements from both parties include break-up of the Big Four, forced separation of their non-audit services, auditor appointment by government authority, and voluntary reduction of their 97% share of the FTSE 350 market.

The optimistic case that encouraging or requiring joint audits might beneficially affect audit quality or increase the competitive access and capability of smaller firms to perform large engagements is found, e.g., in the CMA’s paper, ¶¶ 4.18-.22. There are three challenges -- each distinct and sufficient: capacity, quality and risk tolerance.

Capacity

On the ability of the smaller firms to gain market share, to affect competition and auditor choice, look to the French market, where joint auditors are required. Companies in the CAC 40, France’s large-company index, primarily choose two Big Four firms. The only smaller firm with any index-level participation is Mazars – fifth ranked in France, ninth in the UK and 14th globally. Its 2017 global revenue of $ 1.68 billion is approximately seven percent of the average revenue of the Big Four.

At that size and scope, Mazars has little reasonable prospect of taking on a FTSE 350 engagement, much less one in the FTSE 100. However beneficial its experience in France, Mazars has not grown the capability to obtain and share a joint audit with any of its smaller brethren, whose limitations would if anything be more acute.

On the capacity issue, in short, the French market experience has spoken with eloquence.

Quality

The proposition that joint audit contributes positively to audit quality suffers the familiar challenge of a small sample size and a lack of empirical support. While a research project awaits the attention of a curious scholar, historical experience supports the opposite.

Most recently, in the years under scrutiny for the € 200 billion laundered without discovery or disclosure through the Estonian branch of Danske Bank, the bank’s annual reports show that its audit was done jointly by Grants and KPMG for 2007-2010 and PwC and KPMG for 2011, before one-firm takeover by KPMG for 2012 and 2103, EY for 2014 and finally Deloitte for 2015 onwards.

Five years of joint audits, in short, were no more effective by way of detection or prevention than performance by a single firm.

As a brief sidebar on a related subject, the rotation at Danske through five different audit delivery models over nine years does no favor to the “fresh eyes benefit” urged by the proponents of frequent and mandatory auditor replacement.

There is history. Back in 2003, Deloitte and Grants had shared the audit of Italian dairy conglomerate Parmalat. Disclosure of a € 20 billion hole in its accounts revealed the mechanism: bogus contracts housed in an account labeled the “buco nero” (“black hole”) – colorfully evocative although insufficient to entice preventive inquiry by either or both.

As a precursor, the great Ponzi scheme of the 1970s run at Los Angeles-based Equity Funding involved the separation of audit responsibility between Haskins & Sells, as it was then branded in the US, and a small firm recently joining the US operation of what is now BDO. At the heart of the criminal scheme was concealment from both firms of the creation of whole ledgers of non-existent holders of fictitious life insurance policies.

To summarize, division and sharing of audit responsibility with its challenges of communication and administration brings the risk of cracks through which problems and manipulations may fall undetected.

Risk Tolerance

To conclude, the professional auditing standards permit the division of work between two or more firms (see the PCAOB’s AS 1205 in the US, and ISA 600 as widely adopted elsewhere).

In practice, the principal auditor judges whether and how to make reference to the other auditor (ISA 600.11 and AS 1205.04-.09). Either way, while the choice has implications for the level of responsibility assumed by the other auditor, the principal auditor retains responsibility for the entire scope of its own work – including the adequacy of its reliance and delegated decision-making.

There is the bind, in jurisdictions such as the US where “joint and several” legal liability exposes auditors to 100% of the potentially devastating consequences of a breakdown or failure. Inadequate as the financial resources of a Big Four firm are to protect itself from a deathblow lawsuit, the ability of a smaller firm to assume a meaningful share, monetarily or by percentage, is immaterial.

That limitation assures that the risk-management evaluation of a Big Four firm as principal auditor, persuaded or obliged to share a large audit, will include the time and attention of a full-court press on the actual performance by the smaller firm – involving substantial duplication or overlap and negative consequences for the achievability of cost efficiencies or real sharing of experience or expertise.

Conclusion

There continues to be no sign of official awareness, that none of the proposed “solutions” to the perceived issues around Big Audit is feasible, achievable or capable of affecting audit quality or competition – a fact so far without impact on the public discourse.

Joint audit, among them, is another “non-starter.” Which reinforces the suggestion here that, sooner or later, the intrusion of reality into the discussion should become compelling.

 

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Re-Allocating the Big Audit Market in the United Kingdom – Or Perhaps Not

"Two aristocrats are out horseback riding and one challenges the other to see which can come up with the larger number. The second agrees to the contest, concentrates for a few minutes, and proudly announces, “Three.” The proposer of the game is quiet for half an hour, then finally shrugs and concedes defeat.”

     -- Mathematics professor John Allen Paulos, “Innumeracy” (Hill & Wang 1988)

Regulators and politicians in the United Kingdom may well disrupt the Big Audit model – judging from inquiries launched recently by the Financial Reporting Council and the Competition & Markets Authority. The series that began here on September 25 and October 8, started to address the misguided nature of the purported “remedies.” It is making for pretty heavy going – so with thanks for the opportunity to write this as guest for Going Concern, this to lighten things up a bit.

Grave as are the UK threats to break up the Big Four, strip them down to “audit only” or impose government appointment of large-company auditors, it would take a comedy script-writer to capture the folly by which, it is suggested, the Big Four would “voluntarily” reduce their dominant market share of the FTSE 350 from 97% to 80%.

The head of assurance for Grant Thornton in the UK offered on September 14 that a nationalized appointment authority, which “would take the buying decision from the company … could split audits, say 50 for the Big Four and 50 for the non-Big Four.”

Seriously intended or not, the idea comes oddly from those with expertise in the assessment and comprehension of quantitative information. What comes to mind instead is the stateroom scene in “Night at the Opera.”

To expand and explain -- by 2017 revenue, the ten large firms in the UK array as in the table below (in £ millions). Of their £ 13 billion total, the Big Four garnered over £ 11 billion or 86%. The trailing six firms divided the remaining 14%.  

PwC	3,598
Deloitte	3,380
EY	2,350
KPMG	2,172
Grant Thornton	500
BDO	429
RSM	320
Moore Stephens	181
Mazars	173
PKF	130

If the notion of shifting fully half of the FTSE 100 audits were apportioned by firm revenue, Grants would take fifteen, BDO twelve, RSM nine, and each of the others four or five.

Collectively, how ready and capable would they be? BDO presently has only one such engagement -- Randgold Resources Ltd – actually on the bubble at # 101 -- and that one is likely to go away with the September 25 announcement that the company is to be acquired by Barrick Gold Corp, an audit client of PwC in Toronto.

Grants itself once had a FTSE 100 client, until the stock price collapse of Sports Direct dropped its ranking to # 181. And in any event, that job is to move with the upcoming displacement of Grants thanks to the UK’s mandatory tender and replacement rules. None of the other mid-size firms audits a FTSE 100 company.

As graphically displayed here on September 25, the impact of scale is critical. No number of hours at the controls of a single-engine airplane can qualify a pilot, however skilled, to command a wide-body jet – much less a helicopter or a space shuttle or a stealth drone.

No less, and without a whisper as to the relative work quality up and down the table, the requirement of experience at the Big Four level in performing large-company audits with global footprints and necessary industry expertise is compelling.

So despite the reams of paperwork that will be generated through the inquiries of the UK regulators, it remains a solid certainty that nothing like the suggested 50/50 re-allocation of the FTSE 100 will ever happen.

Sooner the proponents, like Professor Paulos’s mounted aristocrat, eventually “shrug and concede defeat,” sooner the discussion can move to steps of possible achievability and beneficial effect.

 

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Dominance in the Big Audit Market – Reality Meets Its Critics

"The girls all get prettier at closing time….”

             --Mickey Gilley, 1976 (lyrics by Baker Knight)

A series began here on September 25, to look at the agitation in the United Kingdom around the Big Audit model, and the proposals mooted by regulators, politicians, the government's Secretary of State for Business, and the accountants themselves, by which the dominance of the Big Four would supposedly be addressed.

Proposals include split-up of the Big Four, stripping the firms’ ancillary services to reduce them to “audit only,” joint audits with smaller firms, government assignment of engagements, and voluntary reduction of their 98% share of the FTSE down to 80% or, as urged by the Financial Times on September 2, even as far down as 60%.

That introduction looked at a graphic display of the Big Four’s market share – illustrating the impracticality of this array of so-called “solutions” -- at least so long as the world’s capital markets desire the survival of the current model of privately-provided assurance on the global financial statements of the world’s large companies.

Focus here on the achievability of a market share reduction. The FT on September 2 cited Barclays as a “prize” engagement to be taken up by a smaller firm. So consider the simple question of choice-making, and try to imagine a cohort of civil servants charged to evaluate competing proposals to succeed incumbent KPMG.

Of the total 2017 revenue reported by Barclays PLC for 2017, about two-thirds or some £ 14.4 billion was reported in the non-UK operations of Barclays International, conducted through 40 “main entities” in 22 different countries.    

Assume for the nonce that the Financial Reporting Council achieves a sufficient vote of confidence to survive the pending calls for its abolition or wholesale re-working as the UK’s audit regulator. If it is to be the appointment authority, would its remit run to the UK only? How would it address the global challenge that large UK-based companies derive only some 25% to 30% of their revenue inside the country itself?

Suppose the FRC engineered a UK-only shift of Barclays to a smaller firm – which would face the dazzling complexity that two-thirds of the client's operations are foreign-based and must be audited abroad. What would be the realistic likelihood of successful administration and integration of the multi-country non-UK work if still done by KPMG, into and along with the local reporting on the bank’s UK and headquarters operations?

Or, alternatively, suppose the FRC were bold enough to insist that a smaller firm’s global report and opinion would only be compliant if supported by the work of its own ex-UK member firms. All aside from the political challenges of forcing that decision down the throats of regulators around the globe, there would be the impossible challenges to the smaller firms competing for the job, to demonstrate a satisfactory breadth of geographic presence and expertise.

Of no less importance, the FRC itself would require the competence to scrutinize and compare the qualifications of the small firms and their competing applications, including their relative competence to audit complex international banking operations in countries speaking perhaps nine difference languages and using some fifteen different currencies.

The realistic prospects for the required army of functionaries are non-existent. Examples of dubious regulatory choice-making are all too common, and need not go beyond the current criticism of the FRC itself, to raise doubts about the ability of a government agency to supplant the "auditor choice” function now performed by corporate audit committees in the exercise of their own mandated duties.

On a related front, what is the likelihood of any beneficial impact from an attempted reduction in the Big Four’s dominant market share of the FTSE 350?

To start, what is meant? What metric would apply to measure a reduction to 80%, or 60%?

The FRC might seek to enforce auditor choice based on a financial basis. If so, observe that the FTSE 100 and 250 together have a total market capitalization of £ 2.448 trillion. A 20% shift in market share to the smaller auditors would involve re-assigning a portfolio of companies with aggregate market cap of some £ 490 billion – while a 40% share would involve some £ 979 billion.

The scale issue promptly enters, because corporate size, like that of the accounting firms themselves as graphically displayed, is distributed on a “hockey stick” basis. That is, of the total market capitalization of the entire FTSE 350, it takes only the 70 largest companies to make up 80%, while the companies making up 60% reaches down from BP as the largest only so far as Anglo American at number 25.

Practicality now screams at high volume. For firms outside the Big Four to audit a mooted 20% of the FTSE 350, by market capitalization, they would need to take up the audits of all the index companies smaller than about number 71 – an over-whelming total of some 280 engagements.

Or suppose the FRC were to pursue its goal by number of companies only. To move 20% of the 350 might mean displacement of about 70 audit mandates. Suppose briefly that the choice process would focus on the smaller end of the scale (a topic for further inquiry in any event). The total market capitalization of the 70 companies at the lower end of the index is about £ 60 billion. That, for context, makes up about 2.5% of the index total. To shift that number of engagements, for all the cost and disruption involved, surely has the appearance of a goal not worthy of the effort.

Moreover, audit experience and competence are not fungible across industry sectors. The issues and the demands differ, for example, as between banks and hotels and consumer products. By market cap or simple numeric measures, or any other metric passing a test of rationality, the proponents of the “market share reduction” proposition -- trying with straight faces to sell the notion that either competition or audit quality would be beneficially affected – should be obliged to demonstrate the availability of the resources by which the FRC could hope to carry out its charge, and the smaller firms could hope to achieve and demonstrate anything remotely like the necessary capability.

On both, skeptics are waiting.

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Re-Work the Big Four Audit Market Share? A Single Graphic Shows "No Way"

Glendower: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”

Hotspur: “Why, so can I, or so can any man;
               “But will they come when you do call for them?”

            -- Wm Shakespeare, I Henry IV, iii, 1

Can concerns over the suitability of the Big Audit model be addressed by forcing the large firms to shrink their dominant market share – or any of the other "solutions" mooted in the UK by regulators and politicians?

Abetted by the ICAEW, the Big Four floated last month a readiness to reduce their 97% share of the FTSE 350 to 80%. Not good enough, said the Financial Times on September 2, plumping for 60%.

The last year has seen multiple renewals of the perpetual question, “Where were the auditors?” Colonial Bank – Carillion – Danske – Gupta – Steinhoff – ImdB – the examples circle the globe. In London, hostile critics are circling -- fairly salivating at such notions as breaking up the Big Four, stripping them of their ancillary non-audit services, or nationalizing the selection and assignment of large-company engagements.

A blunt truth, for those desiring to maintain the current model of private assurance on the global financial statements of the world’s large companies: none of these can be achieved in a non-disruptive way, nor would they touch either competition or quality, except to be seriously detrimental to both.

To start what will become a series -- the topic being too complex to cover in a single go – there is the simple matter of scale. This graphic[1] arrays ($ millions) the 23 international accounting networks with 2017 global revenue above $ 200 million – from giants Deloitte and PwC at $ 38.8 and $ 37.7 billion down to the $ 361 and $ 207 million of Asia-based ShineWing and UC&CS of Latin America.

The visual message is simple and stark. No network smaller than the Big Four has a prayer of achieving the scale and resources to clamber into a competitive position.

The importance and impact of scale show a fatal flaw in the “market reduction” proposition -- displayed right there on the familiar but under-appreciated “hockey stick” curve. Other examples abound:

• Earthquake damage: there are countless harmless daily tremors, while the exceedingly rare catastrophes are devastating.

• Book sales: a handful of blockbuster authors – J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Bob Woodward – overwhelm both the modestly successful and the long tail of unread dissertations and self-publications.

• Destructive weaponry: the number of nuclear weapons is small but existentially threatening, scaling down from warships and assault helicopters to the local impact of hand-carried firearms, clubs and spears.

Not only does scale matter – its impact is exponential. The two largest of the Big Four are ten times the size of numbers nine and ten – and one hundred times the size of the two at the far right.  

The issue need not assume quality differences. Hosts of talented but struggling and unemployed actors and musicians and athletes wait on tables and hustle ride-shares, while a handful of super-stars get the plum jobs and sign the extravagant deals. In the 16^th century, the small cohorts of Pizarro and Cortés with their Spanish arms, armor and horses subdued the entire Incan and Aztec empires.

On the same core principles -- no amount of best-quality experience auditing community banks and retail brokers and owner-operated corporations can equip any of the thousands of small-network auditors with the credentials, expertise and geographic presence to take on the engagement of a Barclays Bank or a GlaxoSmithKline.

Those examples are cited deliberately. They are urged by the Financial Times as among the “prize mandates,” whose audit committees under a re-engineered model “can as easily appoint an auditor from outside the Big Four as they currently do from within.”

Perhaps not. Shift from the visual to the verbal, with a look at Barclays’s 2017 Country Snapshot. That report, on the global tax position of the UK’s second largest bank by assets and ranked 17th by market capitalization in the FTSE 100, examined and reported on by KPMG, covers 36 countries where the bank’s local turnover ranges from £ 13 billion in the UK down to £ 10 million, plus an additional ten countries below that cut-off.

The scope of KPMG’s tax report, laid out in its footnote, displays the auditor’s obligation to provide holistic global capabilities -- among other matters, to address “which entity to report activity under,” and intra-group eliminations that “include dividend payments, income from intra-group transfers of assets, and income rising from hedging transactions….”

Against those broad needs, an admittedly non-comprehensive sample looked at the publicly-disclosed resources of the four international networks that rank ## 7 through 10, as reported for the ten countries above the Barclays materiality cut-off. Some reasons emerged for possible concern:

• Many of the firms bear the single name or are still under the first-generation leadership of a founder – suggesting at least a question of maturity.

• Several firms disclose that management and service delivery in their locally-listed offices are coordinated regionally or from ex-country locations.

• Of those showing local personnel numbers, a count of five or fewer partners is frequent – several with no more than one or two in the assurance practice.

• And in the disclosures of industry sector or audit practice capability, banking is almost never included.    

Emphasizing again, these challenges take no position on any relationship between size and quality – only that the demands of complex multi-country engagements will outstrip the capabilities of networks locally comprising a small-country client base and limited personnel resources.

Coming installments here will go deeper: the impossibility of nationalizing audit assignments; the fallacy that “joint audit” could be a realistic springboard from which a small firm could vault up to an upper tier FTSE-indexed engagement; and the question, if the Big Four were to surrender clients, just who would choose, and how.

For now, it ought to be clear that neither wishing nor complaining, however loud and passionate, make for achievable policy.

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[1] Source: the International Accounting Bulletin

Blockchain and Bitcoins – Notes From the Sidelines

"Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.”

           -- Don Schiltz, “The Gambler,” 1976, Kenny Rogers's hit in 1978

“You work with risk all the time. What’s the deal with blockchain and bitcoins?”

I have long resisted these invitations. But enough reader inquiries prompt some thoughts – mostly skeptical and cautionary.

To start, I claim no expertise. Nor do I presume to offer recommendations from the fulsome library of available literature. That’s because I am a dedicated observer of the Dunning-Kruger effect, especially its most trenchant real-world application – that the less you know about a complex subject, the more likely you are to commit grave decisional errors based on a combination of ignorance and over-confidence.

My students in Risk Management love Dunning-Kruger. For homework they identify cases where the effect was handled either well or poorly. An example of my own was the decision to part company with a financial advisor, after I had done enough inquiry to appreciate that he knew no more than I did about the then-volatile state of the state of a market bubble.

The literature is wide and varied, in substance and quality. To those inspired to delve into either blockchain or the grab-bags of bitcoins – please be skeptical enough to resist believing that wisdom comes from those seeking to sell something, including advice.

Here then are a few things I believe I know:

One is that blockchain – very briefly, the recording of bi-party transactions on a secure and anonymized distributed ledger – will be transformative, highly disruptive and immensely valuable.

Why? Because leaps of this scale and long-term effects are rare but real. Think of the railroads – human flight – the transistor – and yes, the iPhone. Also more to this topic, the hugely reduced customer transaction costs and information arbitrage in such knowledge transfers as negotiated Wall Street fees and self-booked airline tickets, Uber and Lyft and Airbnb.

Where, when, and which players will emerge as winners? Too early to tell. There is no reason to believe that “Amara’s law” will not apply. That observation, hardly a “law,” is empirically observed -- basically, that the effects of a new technology are over-stated in the short run and under-stated in the long. (Compare the lift-off and flameouts of Webvan and Pets.com two decades ago with the current explosive growth of Instagram and WeWork.) At this early state of blockchain’s evolution it would be futile, and potentially very costly, for an amateur to try to pick the likely surviving successes.

As for Bitcoin and its coevals, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s characterization was of “a fraud…worse than tulip bulbs” -- which he only slightly walked back to say, “if you’re stupid enough to buy it, you’ll pay the price for it one day.”

It is observable that bitcoins fail to date to meet the definition of “money” – none of them satisfying all three conditions: a stable and widely-accepted unit of accounting, a medium for exchange transactions, and a credible store of value.

This does not de-legitimize their inclusion in the world of commodities, where trading markets and exotic financial instruments are based on everything from jet fuel and gold to pork bellies and orange juice concentrate. Except that for these and others, zero-sum trading eventually depends on real end users – whereas crypto trading markets and prices are hostage to a continuously-renewed supply of credulous new participants, to replace those busted out and left nursing their losses and their regrets.

It is true that the entire crypto adventure has transferred considerable real money from the later arrivals to the earlier, although the dramatic Bitcoin price run-up to nearly $ 20,000 last December, and its precipitous fall below $ 7000 last week, left many of the later sheep shorn to the buff. And the earlier punters, now optimistically holding onto unrealized gains, are at the mercy of price fragility with the refreshing supply of “greater fools” apparently dried up.

As for those looking to profit from the infrastructure of crypto trading, I invoke a family relative, a 19^th century entrepreneur who made a fortune out of the California gold rush, not by prospecting or investing in the mines or claims, but by founding an import business to store and sell extravagantly priced fruits and vegetables to the miners and their camp followers. He did very well out of his customers’ pockets – like today’s authors of “how to” manuals on day-trading, as well as casino operators and sellers of lottery tickets.

A note in closing, to warn of the hazard built into the entire crypto universe, as third-party transaction support, custodial services and financing sprout up around the original world of two-party contracts.

That is, history is replete with schemes, sure to emerge with crypto’s evolution, that inhere in the ability to falsify and double-count inventory, multiply the pledging of collateral, and monetize fictitious client assets – from the bogus customers of Equity Funding and the Salad Oil scandal with its storage tanks of water five decades ago, to the unconfirmed mortgage portfolios at Colonial Bank in recent years.

As Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince put it colorfully in July 2007, only months before losing his job when the party ended at the bank, “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”

For myself, if all the same, I’ll be sitting this one out.

 

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The PCAOB Proposes a New Five-Year Plan – Excitement Levels are Muted

"Mann Tracht, und Gott Lacht”

            --Yiddish adage

 “Man plans -- and God laughs.” Heavenly company for bemused reactions to the draft five-year Strategic Plan exposed for public comment by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board on August 10.

The audit regulator in the US is starting afresh. An entire slate of five new Board members was installed in December, ending the two-year extension of chairman Jim Doty’s sell-by date. A sweep of senior staff departures has included the heads of enforcement, registrations and inspection, audit and professional standards, and information technology.

Little wonder the new chairman’s Message touted the engagement of a “strategic planning consultant.” Who else was to help all the new arrivals find their desks?

The results are risibly obvious: page upon page of language so blandly generic as to be taken from available templates or cribbed from those gathering dust in corporate file bins. Mind-deadening language is strewn across an amplitude of numbers:

• Four “areas of strategic focus” in the Message itself
• Four “primary duties” in the description of the agency (p.3)
• Five “values” (p. 4)
• Three “key factors” affecting the strategic outlook (p.5)
• And five “strategic goals,” each bearing between two and four “objectives” (pp. 7-13)

All displayed under cover of five bullets in a press release, to set forth what the Board “intends” – unfortunately omitting any specifics of inter-play amongst them.

It’s a matter of perspective whether issuance of a “plan” that could have come from a desk drawer justifies such a doubtless high-priced exercise. The Board does buy itself the political benefit of a placeholder, as the absence of detail under this top-heavy verbosity will give cover for the time to provide annotations – sure to extend past this fall’s mid-term elections and well toward November 2020. And an approach of “do-nothing, and very slowly” accords with the PCAOB’s long-established tradition of releasing its modest accomplishments only after excruciating periods of contemplation: six years to consider the naming of audit partners, three years before concluding that mandatory auditor rotation was a non-starter, six years to fall in behind the IAASB in requiring extended auditors’ reports, and sixteen years and counting without resolution of its impasse with Chinese authorities over information gathering and audit firm inspections there.

(For entry to a fuller discussion of the PCAOB’s languid history, see my posts of December 21, 2015, February 11, 2014, August 29, 2017, and January 5, 2018, and Chapter Three of my book, “Count Down: The Past, Present and Uncertain Future of the Big Four Accounting Firms” (2d ed. 2017) – here.)

As for the invitation to comment on the Plan and its five Goals, some specific steps might reasonably be slotted into the Board’s aspiration to be “a trusted leader that promotes high quality auditing”:

• At the heart of the PCAOB’s public credibility issues, its objective (1:1) to provide “more timely and relevant feedback” has been frustrated from inception by the lid of confidentiality clamped on the nature and scope of information that is publicly disclosable, under the Sarbanes/Oxley law itself (see Release No. 104-2004-001, August 26, 2004). Unlikely as it would be in the current environment, a legislative initiative to permit real transparency, taken jointly with the leaders of the no-less-reluctant accounting profession itself, would be to the benefit of both. Trust and credibility require no less -- but don’t hold your breath.

• The stated objective (2:1) to “ensure that oversight activities do not impede innovations…” is not met by a plan merely to “monitor the development and implementation of emerging technologies.” Evolution to an assurance function fit for purpose, to supplant the currently low-value “true and fair view” opinion, requires the fundamental elimination of the archaic and detrimental constraints on the scope of ancillary services permissible to auditors. Again – critically necessary, although unlikely.

• To “expand engagement with other audit regulators around the globe” in a meaningful way (3:2) would involve actual advocacy of specific areas of desirable change. By rights this should start by the PCAOB re-visiting with its counter-parts the failure of mandatory re-tender in the UK to avoid the unintended consequence of reduced competition, and the prospect of similarly malign results under the mandatory rotation rules of the EU.

• And, on the other hand, where progress has proved futile and success elusive, namely in China, a strategic retreat is indicated, ahead of the blow-up that is otherwise a present hostage to the antagonisms between the oversight regimes of the two countries.

To close on a non-trivial quibble with the lack of a roadmap to the Plan from the Board’s press release and its five “intents,” no substance is offered on how to “reinforce the PCAOB’s culture of integrity, excellence, effectiveness, collaboration and accountability.”

On that topic, silence from this Board is no surprise, about the long-running criminal proceedings in New York, where ex-agency employees are charged with purloining and transmittal of confidential inspection information. With leadership’s heads firmly down, more impactful than lofty language and process tweaking by the agency is the prospect that the ex-employees are facing potential prison sentences of up to 65 years.

Putting that notion into a “strategic plan” would have suited Voltaire’s 18^th century comment on the state of discipline in the French navy, that hanging the occasional admiral should “encourage the others.”

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“Is Today’s Audit Sustainable?” – Talking With the Academics

 How appealing is our national capital in the dog days of summer? To count a couple ways: The New York Mets – that city’s excuse for a second baseball team – came to town to finish the month of July, and wilted under the hospitality of the Nationals by the record score of 25 - 4. Meanwhile elected law-makers showed unusual bi-partisanship – members of the House of Representatives all bolted for August and even the Senate, over Mitch McConnell’s whining, is taking next week off.

As an exciting way to observe the season, how about a massive convention hotel chock full of academics from around the country and the globe – the annual knees-up of the American Accounting Association.

I’ll be there, and grateful for the opportunity. On Monday morning the 6^th, I will lead a discussion under the title, “Is Today’s Audit Sustainable? Structural Challenges in the Model.”

Themes will be the viability of the current Big Audit model and the capacity of the large firms to withstand the financial, structural and regulatory pressures on their ability to provide services to the world’s large companies.

It’s a target-rich topic – addressed in detail in my book, “Count Down: The Past, Present and Uncertain Future of the Big Four Accounting Firms” – from Emerald Books (2d ed. 2017), also Amazon in the US or the UK).

Among many current items of interest are the recent $ 625 million damages award in the FDIC’s litigation against PwC over its audit of Colonial Bank, the government and regulatory focus in South Africa on KPMG’s work for the politically-connected Gupta family interests, the € 6 billion hole in the accounts of global conglomerate Steinhoff, and this year’s commencement in London of no fewer than three separate official inquiries into the roles and performance of the large accounting firms and the structure and competence of the agencies charged with their regulatory oversight.

I’ll be joined by Martin Martinoff, over from London in his role with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, where he leads that body’s initiative on the future of the accountancy and finance profession.

It’s all at the Gaylord Convention Center, at National Harbor. If in the vicinity, find us and join the conversation. If unable, at least please check out my book. In any event, keep cool and enjoy the summer.

 

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Changing the Big Audit Model: Where Might the Regulators Go?

Changing the Big Audit Model: Where Might the Regulators Go?·

 

- Zack Mayo (Richard Gere), “An Officer and a Gentleman” (1982) – standing in for Financial Reporting Council CEO Stephen Haddrill, Competition and Markets Authority Chairman Andrew Tyrie, and parliamentary inquiry leader Sir John Kingman

 In the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s litigation against PwC over its audits of the failed Colonial Bank in Alabama, Judge Barbara Rothstein has loosed a second blast -- her decision of July 2 fixed damages at $ 625 million, for the liability spelled out at length in her decision last December.

Appeals will come, making premature any crystal-ball gazing on the final result. That did not stop a media snowstorm -- a partial sampling included the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Times of London, Reuters and Bloomberg, Accountancy Age and Compliance Week.

On July 3, Francine McKenna at MarketWatch reckoned this the largest judgment in the U.S. against an auditor – rare as those are, and assuming its ultimate finality. McKenna then shifted her focus from judicial outcomes to negotiated settlements, to round on the practice of protecting settlement figures in private auditor litigation by confidentiality agreements.

She cited as an argument of the firms that settlements should be kept confidential, out of “fear that public awareness of potentially large settlement amounts might undermine confidence in an audit firm’s continued viability and/or prompt clients to abandon it.”

On the basic but seldom-discussed financial fragility of the Big Four networks, her proposition picked up reinforcement from the Times of London on July 9, under the sub-head, “Litigation over a flawed audit could quickly lead to an Arthur Andersen-style collapse.”

This issue should not be new. Starting in 2006 in my “Balance Sheet” column in the late and lamented International Herald Tribune, I have been calculating the litigation “tipping point” that would disintegrate a Big Four firm. Updating, the 2017 edition of my book, “Count Down: The Past, Present and Uncertain Future of the Big Four Accounting Firms” estimates those figures today at between four and six billion dollars at the global level and between one and three billion dollars for one of their U.S. firms standing alone – amounts falling somewhere between “modest” and “scary” considering the level of their exposures.

Is McKenna’s supposition of anxiety on the part of the profession that settlement disclosure might undercut public confidence a straw man? Equally arguable would be the benefit of public recognition that the business models of the Big Four – running on their client receivables and paper-thin capital – are simply not robust to withstand the shock of a truly “bad case” litigation or penalty.

If transparency of the large auditors’ financial information does have the virtue for which McKenna argues, an approach perhaps deserving a refreshed airing would be that the large firms publish their own global financial statements.

It’s been done. In the U.K., the FRC’s Audit Firm Governance Code (section E.5, 2016), requires such statements, although on a county-level basis only. And going back to the 1970s, Arthur Andersen made public its global financial statements.

The FRC or the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in the U.S.could readily craft requirements that would compel such broad disclosure. Audits could even be required, drawing on the Andersen practice that its statements were audited and opined on by Haskins & Sells, as the Deloitte firm in the U.S. was then branded. Such a step would, however, involve a twist both ironic and politically charged, that the only auditors with the scope and scale to report on a Big Four network would be other members of that quartet.

In the pros and cons of that debate, in other words, the critics of the profession who are inclined to see malign cartel behavior under every rock would do well to consider what to wish for.

As for any utility attributable to broad release of settlement information, “public awareness” -- like movie temptress Mae West’s dismissive attitude toward “goodness” -- has nothing to do with it. Competent management and audit committees – as well as any trial counsel with the skills and experience to litigate a ten-figure claim of audit failure – have the information needed to evaluate the soundness of a firm – both absolutely and relative to its peers.

In that calculus, the firms’ litigation exposures and the stability of their finances are further ingredients in an information mix that also includes the virtual lack of auditor replacement choice at the large-company level – a subject front-and-center in the public debate, as witness the three separate inquiries now on-going in London, under remits undertaken by the Financial Reporting Council, the Competition and Markets Authority and the committee instigated by the British parliament.  

The range of possible changes to the Big Audit model being tabled runs from the anodyne to the harmful to the laughably impractical -- “open source” audit software, break-up or spin-off of the Big Four audit practices, or even fixed quotas on a Big Four firm’s book of large clients (see the Times for July 9).

Because the City of London boffins charged to tinker with the UK’s regulatory machinery would think it unseemly to concede the intractability of the issues, Messrs. Haddrill, Tyrie and Kingman may be expected to deliver something. But caution is called for; as the sub-head of the Economist’s May 26 editorial put it, “The audit industry needs fixing. But dismantling the Big Four is not the way to do it.”

As the recent experience with the unintended anti-competitive consequence of the FRC’s requirement for re-tender has shown – namely the withdrawal of the Grant Thornton firm from tendering for FTSE 350 audits – attention by the inquiry trio would be well focused on proposals having both practicality and achievability.

If in the end they manage to do no actual harm, that would deserve to be called success.

 

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• Guest-posted in today’s Going Concern, with thanks and appreciation for the opportunity.

What Next for the Big Four in the UK? London Is Searching

Globalized as the issues challenging the accounting profession have become, London is the current hot-spot, so it was my pleasure this week to offer this guest post for the largely US-based readership of Going Concern – also a chance here to offer my thanks, a major hat-tip and Godspeed to Caleb Newquist as he moves on, and looking forward to working with Jason Bramwell:

 

 A drunk, searching on hands and knees under a street lamp, tells the inquiring police, “I’ve lost my keys – over there in the dark alley.”

“Then why look here?” they ask, perplexed.

“Because the light’s better here.”

In the City of London, where the modern audit profession was born in the Victorian era, no fewer than three separate inquiries have been launched into the business and performance of the dominant Big Four accounting firms and the fitness for purpose of their UK regulator, the Financial Reporting Council.

As for the chances of anything beneficial emerging, instead of detrimental unintended consequences for the stability and viability of Big Audit? There are ample reasons for doubt.

The leaders of the inquiries have set out their stalls, with their aims on full display:

• Stephen Haddrill, CEO of the FRC, put a target on the back of the Big Four in January, telling a parliamentary committee that, “we feel there should be more competition in the major accounting and audit area” – echoed in March in the FRC’s strategic plan (page 7): “As a regulator we cannot be content that just four large firms dominate the market for audit services.”

• Haddrill’s invitation to the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate the prospects that the Big Four should be stripped to “audit only” was taken up with enthusiasm by its new head, Andrew Tyrie, quoted as telling a parliamentary committee that “the ‘competition’ aspect of the Big Four is ‘certainly’ something that needs to be looked at.”

• And the Secretary of State for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has triggered a broad review of the remit, structure and performance of the FRC, under the leadership of Sir John Kingman, whose call for evidence of June 6, 2018, includes as a starting premise in its Foreword that in the Big Audit market “there are well-documented structural competition weaknesses.”

With their opening biases so declared, the approach of all three scape-goating exercises is the familiar “ready … fire … aim” – that is:

• Detailed further admiration of issues long since fully articulated at tedious length.

• Intense and splenetic venting and finger-pointing by the profession’s most ardent critics.

• And re-hashing – and even possible imposition – of “solutions” already examined and found wanting for effectiveness or achievability.  

Focus on these subsidiary areas will at best – and least damaging -- generate bulging records of compelling irrelevance, when such foundational topics should be pursued instead as:

• A broad-based search for consensus on the shared aspirations and goals to be served by a Big Audit function fit for modern purpose.

• Assessment of the barriers to achievement, including candid recognition of the need to re-examine the on-going validity and relevance of long-held beliefs of dubious current value.

• Enlistment of the active involvement of all capital markets participants whose participation and buy-in is necessary.

The prospects do not give cause for optimism. Politicians and regulators are consistent in displaying constraints on their vision, commitment to short-term motion as a substitute for long-term progress, and readiness to apply yesterday’s tools to tomorrow’s problems.

Examples are as close to hand as the negative effect on auditor choice generated by the FRC’s 2012 requirement for mandatory re-tender, leading not to its declared goal of increased competition, but contrarily this March to Grant Thornton’s withdrawal from competing for FTSE 350 audit engagements, or the cascade of American corporate failures in the 2007-2008 financial crisis despite the bally-hooed aspirations of the Sarbanes/Oxley Act of 2002.

Collectively the troika of Messrs. Haddrill, Tyrie and Kingman has potential to run the Big Audit model headlong into the ditch, by driving toward the future with eyes staring fixedly at the road behind. If so the dispiriting prospect is that they might manage perversely to regulate the Big Four firms into a fatal decline to disintegration.

It will take a level of shared vision and skilled diplomacy not often seen in such a complex multi-party setting to avoid such an outcome – much less to reach what might be called success.

 

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The Big Four: Break-Up or Audit Only? Can They Survive the UK Regulators?

“Whining don’t get the hay in” was an article of faith for the family farms of my youth on the prairie of agricultural America. Surviving, alive to plant another year’s crop, required clear-eyed acceptance of the facts as found, and strategies that were realistic and achievable.

 It’s different these days in London, where the model for audits of the world’s large public companies faces a storm of perfervid criticism. The latest is a chapter in the full-throated screed, released on May 16, 2018, by two committees of the British parliament, broadcasting blame far and wide for last January’s collapse of Carillion.

The report (page 85) would refer:

“the statutory audit market to the Competition and Markets Authority. The terms of reference of that review should explicitly include consideration of both breaking up the Big Four into more audit firms, and detaching audit arms from those providing other professional services.”

The MPs link arms with an entire chorus line of the like-minded – the competition authority’s own Andrew Tyrie, CEO Stephen Haddrill of the Financial Reporting Council, and City grandee Sir John Kingman as nominee of government itself – all abetted by the shrill voices of enthusiastic commentators.

What is conveyed in passion, however, is lacking in demonstrated comprehension of the target – that is, recognition of the limited ability of government to act in a benign and beneficial way.

Possibly – and in no way as apologist for the Big Four or their accountability -- well-informed information users in the capital markets may truly desire the continued vitality of the current Big Audit model, and the traditional single “pass/fail” audit opinion on the consolidated financial statements of global companies – although all the qualifiers loaded into that assumption should be taken with deep skepticism.

If so, consider the misguided requirement of mandatory auditor re-tender, imposed by the FRC in 2012, ostensibly for pro-competition reasons. The resulting cost, disruption and continued concentration have instead now driven Grant Thornton, the fifth-ranked firm in the UK, to foreswear future tendering for FTSE 350 audits – joined this week by BDO’s reported readiness to do the same if forced to shed its practice in ancillary non-audit services.

Demonstrably disruptive on the downside, the UK regulators have the power to kill a Big Four firm, or indeed the entire model, through failure to recognize the continued application of the law of unintended consequences. What their limited vision and authority shows no ability to achieve is a positive contribution to the stability of Big Audit.

Splitting up the Big Four in the UK would not only be ineffective on a global scale, because failing to reach the dozens of foreign jurisdictions where 75% of the revenue of UK-based FTSE 100 companies is derived. Neither would such a move add any new competition. Instead, the newly created smaller organs would each be partial in scope and limited in industry expertise and resources, hobbled by formidable cost inefficiencies in re-building duplicative infrastructure, and severely weakened in their financial ability to withstand the shocks of litigation and liability exposures that already threaten the stability and very survival of the Big Four.

As for attempts to force the firms into “audit only” structures, the issues of financial weakening and global impracticality apply no less. More importantly, reverting to the skeptical questions as to the dubious value of the current commodity-valued “pass/fail” report, the rapidly evolving environment of Big Data in all its various permutations means that every element of the assurance model that was invented in and survives anachronistically from the Victorian era will inevitably evolve as well.

Providers of that service in a form fit for future purpose will require precisely the skills residing in the advisory capabilities of the Big Four. And elsewhere, to be sure, which means that deployment by the UK regulators of a “neutron bomb” that would annihilate the Big Four’s ancillary services would achieve only one dramatically consequential result: After several years of sifting through the radioactive rubble of the disintegrated Big Four, new species of assurance providers would evolve from the wreckage, emerging out of the surviving niches and other consultancies capable of building the competencies and expertise to provide value in response to the needs of information users.

Asked in 2005 what he and his fellow regulators would do in the event of another Andersen-like failure, PCAOB chairman William McDonough was candid to say, “None of us has a clue.”

With the current whining, finger pointing and blame mongering that threaten the availability of assurance in the form that users profess to want, McDonough’s reality check remains a cautioning guide.

 

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And for expanded treatment of these themes, please see my book, “Count Down: The Past, Present and Uncertain Future of the Big Four Accounting Firms”—summary information is on its Amazon pages in the US and the UK.

 

Should the Big Four Be Broken Up? The Discussion Sharpens

This coming Monday, April 30, London’s Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation is hosting an open public discussion – “The Future of Audit: Break Up or Shape Up?”

I am pleased to have a panelist’s seat.

Details and free sign-up are here. Mid-day timing is convenient – venue in the City at Armourers' Hall – wine and sandwiches served. Media are interested and will be there, but Chatham House Rule. Attendance is invited and welcome -- a lively time is promised.

Here’s the background: In late January Stephen Haddrill, chief executive of the Financial Reporting Council, Britain’s audit regulator, called for investigation of the audit market -- quoted by the Financial Times as telling a parliamentary committee that “we feel there should be more competition in the major accounting and audit area.” He extended his scope on March 16, proposing that “Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority should investigate the case for ‘audit only’ firms in an effort to bolster competition and stamp out conflicts of interest in the sector.”

The FRC’s strategic plan, released in March, doubled down on Haddrill’s advocacy (page 7):

“Competition – or lack of it – at the top end of the audit market remains a serious concern. As a regulator we cannot be content that just four large firms dominate the market for audit services.”

Public attention followed. The Financial Times on March 21 ran a “head-to-head,” in which Natasha Landell-Mills of asset manager Sarasin & Partners and I took opposite sides on a Big Four split-up. The FT published wide-ranging reader reactions, and the CSFI picked up the ball.

Careful moderating may keep the agenda on the rails. In the meantime, the FRC’s positions raise at least two serious issues.

First is the matter of its own record, on which Parliamentary attention has not been kind. The chair of the Commons business committee delivered the charge that the FRC was both “toothless” and “useless,” rounding on its attention to this winter’s collapse of outsourcing company Carillion, and a City grandee, Legal & General chairman Sir John Kingman, has been designated to lead a broad inquiry into the FRC’s performance, operations, governance and operations.

Whether the FRC deserves the epithets will abide Mr. Kingman’s inquiry. Meanwhile my own views are well recorded, that any attempts to split up or strip down the Big Four are doomed as ill-advised and ineffective to address the perceived issues.

Second and directly to the point, it is of no little irony that Mr. Haddrill’s lobbying on competition braced the March announcement by the UK firm of Grant Thornton – by size the fifth in the UK and in the network ranking seventh globally – that it would stop bidding for audit engagements among the FTSE 350, the UK’s large public companies.

On this shrinkage the FRC resoundingly scored an own goal, as the responsibility lies directly with its misguided 2012 requirement that UK public companies put their audits out for re-tender.

The consequences of that empirically unsupported initiative may have been unintended, but they were not unforeseen. As I blogged in August of 2013, while the regulators' timetable for mandatory re-tender was still to be fixed, these results could be expected:

“Mid-tier firms withdrawing from tenders for inability or unwillingness to sustain the impact on their personnel and their business models.

“Further intrusion of the Big Four into the client lists of the mid-tier firms, with resulting increase in the market concentration among that tetrapoly, based on their ability to deploy superior resources against uncertain defenses.”

As we will explore at the April 30 event, any further such tinkering by the FRC is hostage to the global scale on which multi-national audits are undertaken – even as its strategic plan concedes (page 18), “the FRC, like other audit regulators, has no authority over the audit firms’ international networks.”

In looking with concern and skepticism at the viability and sustainability of the current Big Audit model – including in my book, “Count Down: The Past, Present and Uncertain Future of the Big Four Accounting Firms” – I am not an apologist for the accounting profession or its members, who are legitimately answerable for the quality of their performance.

But if participants in the capital markets are genuinely interested in audits provided by private partnerships that will deliver single reports on the globally consolidated financial statements of their clients – with serious emphasis on the if – then discussion needs to be fact-based and focused on the market realities and the achievability of whatever steps may be offered.

Which said, please join us on the 30^th.

 

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The Investors in Theranos – “We Don’t Need No Stinking Auditors”

 

What does the Theranos debacle teach about whether or not investors really value the opinions of independent auditors?

The question is timely, as criticism swirls around the globe about both the performance of the auditors (see the dialog I joined last week in the Financial Times, here) and the efficacy of their regulators (see here for a British MP’s call for scrutiny of the Financial Reporting Council).    

On March 19, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged that Theranos, the micro-stick blood testing enterprise started by Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes in 2003, was “an elaborate years-long fraud.” Law enforcement finally caught up with exposures reported back to 2015, that the entire promise of low-cost, sophisticated patient-friendly testing and analysis was built out of lies and fantasy.

As described by MarketWatch’s Francine McKenna on March 20, the erstwhile unicorn that made Holmes a Silicon Valley superstar, business media darling and temporary multi-billionaire was able to seduce $ 700 million from wealthy investors, the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison, “accredited investors” under the SEC rules that, instead of requiring years of audited financial statements, permitted no more information than a binder of publicity releases and unaudited spreadsheet projections, supported by a board of marquee names including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Mattis and David Boies.

The entangled symbolism is positively cringe-inducing: A winsome young blonde enticed credulous, cross-generational “smart money” with a high-tech Edenic temptation. There was even an apple, invoked by her costuming in Steve Jobs’s black turtleneck. As for the sanguinary path to fall and expulsion … enough is enough.

Meanwhile the feckless “no audit – no problem” attitude of the cast of veteran investors was Shakespearean. The Bard’s own “old Adam” takes the stage in “As You Like It” just after Jaques’s reminder that in the seven ages of man, the “last scene of all, that ends their strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion.”  

Should lesser investors follow Murdoch and Ellison in their indifference to diligence? Should the regulators let them? There are reasons to resist a cynical, laissez-faire conclusion. To start, the $ 100 million said to be Murdoch’s loss on Theranos is measurable against his reported personal wealth somewhere north of $ 15 billion. Among the playthings that quantify Ellison’s readily open purse, his latest yachting adventure, the 88-meter “Mushali,” occupies a hole in the ocean reportedly valued at $ 130 million.

The funding of Theranos, privately placed and speedily lost in “childishness and oblivion,” in chunks of a size on which the vast majority of investors would happily live forever after, was relative lunch money – a small-change bagatelle -- to the cohort of those succumbing to the Holmsean blandishments.

It could be tempting to invert the old cliché – “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” – to ask, “If that’s how smart you are, how have you stayed so rich?” Except that schadenfreude is pointless. The Theranos investors will survive untouched and unmarked by the public’s lack of sympathy.

The SEC’s metrics for “accredited investor” set minimum thresholds based on income and net worth, rather than requiring demonstrable acuity of judgment or the ability to resist a compelling sales pitch. And a good thing too, herd behavior being what it is. Consider the likelihood that the roster of luminaries marshaled at Theranos by Holmes would – if allowed by more generous regulation – have passed out offering binders to the faithful, acting as bell-goats leading flocks of eager lambs to their shearing if not all the way to slaughter.

For investors aspiring to achieve reasonable and legitimate growth and safety in their Keogh plans, investment accounts and retirement funds, and also for the gate-keepers and enforcers charged to look after the public interest in the capital markets, Ronald Reagan’s old maxim still holds:

“Trust – but verify.”

 

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Should the Big Four Be Split Up? Join Me in the Media Discussion

Please join me in the debate, which it's my pleasure to help take up a level.

On March 16, as reported in the Financial Times, the UK's accountancy regulator:

"called for an inquiry into whether the Big Four accountancy firms should be broken up, in a move aimed at ending their dominant position auditing the accounts of Britain’s biggest listed companies. Stephen Haddrill, chief executive of the Financial Reporting Council that regulates accountants, said Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority should investigate the case for “audit only” firms in an effort to bolster competition and stamp out conflicts of interest in the sector."

Believing as I do that vivisection of the Big Four is neither realistic nor responsive to the serious issues involved in the current state of Big Audit, I am happy to have my views be part of the FT's "head-to-head" on the subject -- see the Financial Times now on-line here, or the print edition for March 22.

As my opening there puts it:

"The recent spate of large-scale corporate accounting scandals is deeply worrying and raises a familiar question: “Where were the auditors?” But the correct answer does not involve breaking up the four professional services firms that dominate auditing."

The FT invites and will publish selected reader reactions and opinions. This is to extend the same invitation here.

 

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