Quoracy.com

British journalist and writer Polly Toynbee, pictured at the “National Poverty Hearing” at Westminster; December 2006. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Writing in the UK Guardian today, (page 31 – if you cannot buy the paper, you’ll find it among the related articles below assuming it is still available if you are reading this in a few weeks), Polly Toynbee accuses the Big Four of being “at the heart of almost every tax-avoiding scheme”. She proceeds to comment on their grip of the audit market and that, despite grave failures in auditing the banks they have not been disciplined by professional bodies.

Thank you, Ms Toynbee! We at Quoracy.com would just add that their immense lobbying power at the level of governments and regulatory institutions – their virtual control as a cartel of almost every regulatory insitution for audit in the EU – has made them almost impossible to punish. At the same time the middle tier audit Firms, with far fewer blemishes on their records, are bearing a proportionately greater brunt of the reforms that these Big Four governed or influenced “independent” bodies have enacted or are in the process of enacting.

No doubt they hope that they can pass their latest trick of raising the audit thresholds, in which the hidden agenda is to weaken the next tier down from the Big Four even more in the hope that some of the firms disappear (already appears to be happening to PKF from what was spoken about at their recent Cuba conference, and the merging into BDO of three already of their G20 firms) and that others will tone down or give up their audit offer. After which time, of course, they will no doubt be ready to lower the thresholds once again, in order to grab what they can from the reduced state of their mid-tier competition.

You heard it here first. Or maybe you know it already. If you’ve been running a mid-tier audit firm, you probably know it only too well…

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• Britain could end these tax scams by hitting the big four | Polly Toynbee (guardian.co.uk)
• Be bold, Labour, and expose Osborne’s skivers v strivers lie | Polly Toynbee (guardian.co.uk)