On page 66 of the annual report, the auditors note that "commercial income is material to the income statement and amounts accrued at the year end are judgmental.
But at the Treasury committee this morning, the chancellor outlined a number of measures being taken to ensure his cuts would be achieved, including improving the financial performance data available, reducing costly quangos, and introducing greater transparency into public expenditure, so allowing "a nation of auditors" – ie the general public – to check where their money was going.
Walk through the Kirchberg region of the capital and you are struck by the number of EU institutions here: the court of justice, the court of auditors, parts of the commission and parliament, and the statistics office Eurostat.
Moreover, there has been no independent auditors report since September 2012".
In the investigations that followed it emerged that Mr Nadir's authority was such that only his signature was required for vast money transfers between the UK and Cyprus, while by the simple fact of using different firms of auditors for the UK and Cyprus operations it had been possible for each side to believe the real money was being made by the other.
A country that can't hire enough auditors to keep up with business taxes is also unlikely to pay enough people to sift through databases of tax IDs from registered receipts that live, crumpled, in the pockets of forgetful citizens.
The crisis has also highlighted endemic corruption, with national auditors saying in February that authorities in Sierra Leone had failed to properly account for almost a third of the money allocated to fight the disease.
You can imagine that in the course of a not-so-balmy summer, one of Europe's biggest businesses suddenly went off its collective trolley and put out a confected set of figures – which, let me emphasise, were not checked over by its auditors.
To be clear, we don't know that anything like this happened – yet it's exactly to avoid such suspicions arising that we have auditors.
Just as with credit-rating agencies, auditing is a necessary part of the financial markets – but the auditors are paid by the very companies they are judging.
All those banks that collapsed in the crisis were signed off as perfectly sound by PwC and its fellow auditors.
