KPMG Fined £21M For Being "Exceptionally Bad"

 

Another day, another fine for a Big Four auditor.

KPMG has been slapped with a record £21 million fine by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) over its botched auditing of Carillion, the construction company that went spectacularly bust in 2018.

The FRC said that KPMG's audits of Carillion were "exceptionally bad" and that the firm had failed to "discharge its professional duties properly".

The fine is the latest blow to KPMG, which has been under increasing scrutiny in recent years over its auditing practices. The firm has been fined a number of times for audit failings, including a £14.4 million fine last year for misleading the FRC during spot checks on its audit of Carillion.

The Carillion collapse was one of the biggest corporate failures in British history. The company went bust with debts of almost £7 billion, leaving thousands of workers and suppliers out of pocket.

A public inquiry into the collapse found that KPMG's audits of Carillion were "deeply flawed" and that the firm had failed to spot a number of red flags, such as the company's aggressive accounting practices and its over reliance on debt.

The FRC's latest fine is a welcome sign that the regulator is taking a tougher stance on audit failings. However, it is clear that the Big Four auditors still have a long way to go to improve their standards.

This is just the latest in a string of audit failings by the Big Four. It is clear that these firms need to do much more to improve their standards.

Here's what needs to happen:

• The FRC needs to be given more powers to hold auditors to account. This could include the power to impose larger fines and to disqualify individuals from working as auditors.
• The Big Four auditors need to be split up. This would create more competition in the audit market and would make it more difficult for the Big Four auditors to collude.
• There needs to be more transparency in the audit process. This could involve requiring auditors to publish more detailed reports on their audits and to give shareholders a greater say in the appointment of auditors.

Only by taking these steps can we restore confidence in the audit profession and protect investors from audit failings.

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ICAEW Trousers £14M Carillion Fine - "Shameful!"

 

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) is once again facing a barrage of criticism after it was confirmed this week that KPMG’s £14.4m Carillion audit fine will be paid to ICAEW because the regulatory action fell within the accountancy scheme, which was introduced in 2004.  

As KPMG tries to repair its damaged reputation, politicians and ICAEW’s own members are questioning why the professional body is retaining all of the fines. 

Accountancy scheme 

In recent years, ICAEW has received KPMG’s £13m fine from the Silentnight insolvency and Deloitte’s record £15m fine over the audit of ill-fated software firm Autonomy.

With costs included, and the addition of the recent Carillion fine, the combined total from these fines exceeds £50m – and if you were to look further back, ICAEW has gathered £123.4m since 2004.

However, ICAEW can lay claim to the fines because, under the funding arrangements, professional bodies pick up the cost of investigations by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) in advance. 

In return professional bodies get the money from any fines, rather than that pot of money being used as compensation. Alternatively, though, when a case is brought to tribunal by the regulator and there isn’t a fine, the professional body bears the cost instead. ICAEW also points out that even where fines have been imposed, some cost orders do not fully reimbuse professional bodies for the whole costs of the investigation.  

The institute also stresses that the money received from fines is not used to offset ICAEW’s operational expenditure but is “allocated to our strategic reserves and it supports our wider commitment to serve the public interest, as required by the terms of our Royal Charter”.

While ICAEW has retained the costs, as it was legally entitled to, the move has roused similar criticism that was aimed at the institute when it received the KPMG’s Silentnight £13m fine, rather than the pension holders who were set to lose around 30% of their pot due to the mattress company falling into insolvency. That incident prompted The Times’s columnist Patrick Hosking to fume, “the more dishonesty and fraud discovered in the profession, the more profit the institute stands to make”.

Criticism

The pressure on ICAEW comes as KPMG agreed to pay the fine, reduced from £20m, after a five-week trial found five former KPMG auditors guilty of forging documents. 

KPMG has previously been accused of failing to maintain professional independence as the auditor of Carillion and missing multiple “red flags”. Creditors claim to have lost billions of pounds in dividends, advisory fees and losses as it continued to trade.

But the fine going to ICAEW has only reignited the condemnation previously heard during the Silentnight episode. Former pensions minister Baroness Altmann has added her voice to the calls for the money to go to the creditors and not ICAEW, saying: “Something has gone wrong here.” 

Meanwhile, ICAEW members have also expressed concern over how the perception of the institute keeping the proceeds will tarnish the brand. Chartered accountant and ICAEW critic Ken Frost was particularly scathing. “I think it is shameful that my professional body seeks to profit from the wrongdoing of member firms,” said Frost. “It is, of course, quite correct that the ICAEW issued the fine. However, it is shameful that they have decided to ‘trouser it’ like a spiv City trader from the 80s.

“Additionally, it beggars belief that the ICAEW thinks that this won’t damage their brand!”

A different approach

The accountancy scheme is set to wind down soon as part of a government reform and the funding arrangements are also expected to switch to the government. 

Despite the removal of the accountancy scheme, professional bodies must continue to fund investigations of all new complaints brought by the FRC under the audit enforcement procedure.

An ICAEW spokesperson said that the professional body would welcome the rationalisation of the “different schemes which now exist to pay for this aspect of the FRC’s regulatory work.” 

They continued: “We do not believe that any of the professional bodies would object to being removed entirely from the funding process, with all fines in future going to HM Treasury. We would be happy to discuss this with BEIS [the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy], the FRC or – when it is eventually established – ARGA.”

I have been asked by the ICAEW to point out that the ICAEW did not issue the fine.  The fine was issued by an independent tribunal of the FRC and the size of any fine was entirely their decision.

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ICAEW Cracks Down On Self Certification of CPD

Be warned, the ICAEW is cracking down on those members who fail to complete their annual self certification of CPD.

AccountingWeb (ignore the misleading title of their report) reports that Robert Pasley was reprimanded and fined £3,000 with £1,100 costs for breaching ICAEW bye-law 56(c) which requires members to certify their compliance with ICAEW CPD provisions on an annual basis.

Wrt AccountingWeb's misleading article title, a cynic might opine that were the ICAEW ever to crack down on actual CPD undertaken by every member, it is likely the ICAEW would lose half its membership.