Member

Annual audit quality inspection reports show that too many accounting firms currently auditing local authorities still do not meet the feather duster auditing standards of the Financial Reporting Council. We all remember how KPMG falsified the documentation submitted for the Carillion audit failure investigation, and how PwC programmed its audit partner to spend just two hours on the BHS audit. What empirical evidence can the Minister provide to show that these practices do not and will not happen in local authority audits? I declare an interest: I was adviser to the Work and Pensions Committee for the investigations into the audit failures at Carillion and BHS.