Shocking, shonky audits are multiplying

I AM so happy to finally see the public spotlight being shone on the poor standard of auditors we have in this country.

Auditors, unfortunately, are being swayed by their greed for the almighty dollar, just like many other so-called professionals in the corporate world.

To hell with principles and ethics, and even to hell with calculators and common sense.

It appears audit outcomes are as rubbery as they need to be, to stretch around that big fat fee payment.

Legal action against auditors is not uncommon — I’ve lost track of the number of smaller company owners with terrible examples of poor audit quality and even corruption by auditors on asset values and “reasonable” opinions.

It’s assumed by many, in both the big end of town and the small business sector, audit opinions are bought.

And we all know the old saying: “the customer is always right”.

But shareholders, consumers, investors, employees and the whole economy shouldn’t be told to just accept we can’t trust an audit report or that auditors have been paid to give a clean report for a company or organisation.

But that’s what we are being asked to do — the government regulator is well aware of this outrage and is doing little about it.

According to the last inspection of audits released this year by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, 25 per cent of audits last year were dodgy.

Yeah, 25 per cent! But the previous survey found 19 per cent of audits were dodgy, so things are getting worse.

And the areas where they are dodgy are the same as all previous years, so it’s not even that auditors are coming up with tricky new ways and different loopholes to do their dodgy reports. They’re using the same old tricks over and over and nothing is being done to shut them down.

ASIC appears to be just going about its merry way reporting the statistics. Ho hum, nothing to see here — except the usual poor standard of audits in Australia.

Of course, the rot is much deeper than just the auditors themselves — it extends to the board members of the companies. They are ultimately responsible for the audit report and the opinion in it.

(Funny how so many things bad with corporate Australia keep coming back to the board members.)

But the responsibility also extends to the company secretary and accountants.

They are supposed to be ethical professionals, yet are either encouraging or willingly turning a blind eye to these dodgy audit reports.

What a sad, sorry state of affairs — these professionals, be they board members, account- ants, chief executives, chief financial officer, audit committee members or the dozen or so other people involved in preparing a financial report, are expected to (and do) willingly go along with this illegal behaviour.

And so much for all those so-called professional organisations with their fake code of ethics that jump to the defence of these crooked professionals — financed by the membership fees these crooks pay to belong.

Where are their ethics and professional standards?

Silence.