Crash Investiga Tors

摘要

No auditor from the Big Four, or from any other accountancy firm for that matter, is likely to approve of the idea that their role in relation to the banking crisis is akin to crash investigators at work amid the smouldering remains of an air crash. Nonetheless, the analogy's reasonable enough. Crash investigators are highly trained professionals and part of their professionalism is to be calm and objective about disaster. After all, their function is essentially a historical one: to investigate what's already happened. Auditors do much the same: setting out to provide what John Hitchins, UK banking leader and a bank audit partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, describes as 'reasonable guidance to investors about historical data'. And Hitchins emphasises: 'Auditors can't be expected to provide absolute guidance: doing so would be too expensive.' And impractical too. Mark Rhys, an auditor and partner in the banking and securities group at Deloitte, agrees with Hitchins' thumbnail description of what auditors do, and goes on to say: 'In the wake of the banking crisis, the question of whether auditors could have done more to prevent it has, naturally enough, been widely asked. I wouldn't blame anyone for posing the question, but I think it's unfair to blame auditors for having somehow contributed to the crisis. How could we have done? We're not futurologists.'