What can be done to restore faith in accounts and accountants?Related items Enron and auditing: The lessons from EnronFeb 7th 2002 Bagehot: Twister comingJan 31st 2002 Global Crossing's bankruptcy: Survival of the slowestJan 31st 2002 Andersen: Wisdom mislaidJan 24th 2002Accountants themselves have begun belatedly to clean up their act.
That ill-fated choice paved the way for a watering-down of the audit report that plagues markets to this day.Even in the age of voluntary audits, accountants were rarely held accountable for their clients' sins.
However, accountants demanded compensation for the added accountability: the policy led to a 13% increase in audit fees.Conspicuously absent from the American proposals is the idea that would most incense the industry: mandatory audit rotation.
In America, these are set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), a bunch of accountants who have drawn up a body of "generally accepted accounting principles" (GAAP).
Outside lawyers and accountants set up "ghost" networks of offshore companies, to make the transfers even more opaque.
There is a debate to be had about exactly how you factor in a big payment like rescuing a broken banking system; I imagine it would mesmerise accountants everywhere.
Chas Roy-Chowdhury, head of taxation at the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, said: "If we are looking at tax and benefits, some very vulnerable people will feel the full brunt of this cost-saving measure.
Darling was reported by the Daily Telegraph last week to be among ministers who had paid accountants thousands of pounds of public money to complete personal tax returns, with his bills totalling £1,400 over two years.
Such are the mountains of Manchester United's debts since the Glazer takeover that accountants estimate the revenue from their fanbase will need to rise by 5,888,765% over the next two years.
For their part, accountants are often aware of their industry's shortcomings.
"Was it for this?" asked the Irish Times plaintively, evoking the poetry of WB Yeats from 1913 to grieve over the surrender of Irish sovereignty to a bunch of IMF and ECB accountants.
