UK audit reform proposals: Full of sound and fury but likely to amount to nothing

Let's all say again that auditors are supposed to be performing their public duty and finding fraud, shall we?

One after another the ongoing revelations of corporate fraud and bankruptcy in the UK remind us that audits — the last defense against failed financial reporting for investors and the markets — are still not preventing, detecting, or warning anyone about it. 

Enron’s bankruptcy, and its auditor Arthur Andersen’s collapse, happened twenty years ago. The …