FRC Seminars, Lookers Results, Caparo Judgement and Autonomy Case

I attended two seminars organised by ShareSoc and UKSA with the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) yesterday (24/11/2020) and the day before. The first session was about the “ARGA transformation”, i.e. the steps being taken to improve the audits of companies and the reporting of accounts following the Kingman review two years ago. ARGA stands for Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority which will be the new name for the FRC.

Before reporting on the meeting, it’s worth noting the latest example of how audits have failed to disclose substantial errors in accounts, including fraud, in the case of Lookers (LOOK). In their announcement on Tuesday they made it clear that profits had been wildly overstated for some years and the balance sheet was likewise overstated. To quote from the announcement: “A total of £25.5m of non-cash adjustments are necessary to correct misstatements in PBT over a number of years” and “Adjustments reduce  PBT by £10.9m in 2019 and £7.2m in 2018 with the balance cumulatively decreasing PBT by £7.4m in 2017 and earlier”. Auditors Deloitte have resigned.

It is a regular occurrence that the published accounts of public companies are subsequently shown to be wrong and that fraud goes undetected. The audit process which investors rely on to enable them to have confidence in the accounts on which they are basing investment decisions is clearly regularly failing.

The FRC seminar was presented by Sir Jon Thompson, their new CEO following a wholesale shake-up of management, and Miranda Craig, Director of Strategy and Change. They reported on the progress to implement the required changes, many of which require changes to legislation. They hope to get those implemented in the second half of 2021 with ARGA becoming live in 2022. But none of this is certain as it depends on Government co-operation and priorities. There will also need to be another consultation round on the details of the proposals.

The Kingman review proposed joint audits be introduced but the Government has decided against that but managed shared audits are being considered so as to give smaller audit firms some involvement in bigger audits.

ShareSoc Director Cliff Weight asked a question about the Caparo legal judgement and the problem of people holding shares in nominee accounts not being “members” of a company.  I followed up with some points on Caparo, which Sir John Thompson did not appear to know much about and assigned a response to someone else.

Let me explain why this issue is so important and how the Caparo legal judgement undermined the duties of auditors.

Investors in the stock market purchase shares on the basis of the published accounts of companies being a fair view of their financial position. Before the Caparo legal judgement in 1990 it was widely assumed that auditors had a duty of care to shareholders – after all what was the purpose of the audit other than to provide reassurance to shareholders? Historically that was why audits were introduced. See this ShareSoc blog for more information https://www.sharesoc.org/blog/regulations-and-law/audit-quality-caparo-judgement/ and there are more details of the legal case on Wikipedia.

This judgement effectively meant that no shareholder in a company could sue the auditors for incompetence or breach of duty, only the company could. But that rarely happens, when it is the shareholders that have typically lost money as a result. In fact some auditors have claimed that even the company does not have a claim if the reported accounts were false because it might not necessarily have affected what actions the company took. Sometimes when a company goes into administration the liquidators might sue, as in the recent example of Patisserie (CAKE) but there is no certainty of success or any pay-out to shareholders.

The failure to make auditors responsible financially to investors relieves them of a big financial incentive to do their work properly and to identify false or fraudulent accounts.

I put it to Miranda Craig that all that was required to fix this problem was a simple Act of Parliament to overturn the Caparo judgement. She suggested they did not have the powers to implement this but that is a weak excuse.  They could surely suggest to the Government that such an Act be introduced as it’s perfectly practical. It just needs to reinstate the duty of auditors to shareholders and overturn the somewhat perverse decision in the Caparo judgement.

Another attendee at the seminar raised the issue of the auditors being able to limit liability to the company by contractual means which is another issue that needs tackling.

The second seminar was about “Enforcement”, presented by Claudia Mortimore and Jamie Symington. There has been growth in the enforcement team – from 9 staff in 2012 to 54 now. Certainly enforcement has been more active but they are still hampered in some cases by limitations on their powers – for example they only have powers over members of regulatory bodies whereas many company directors are not such members (even finance directors or chairs of audit committees). There are plans to change this.

They have identified two main issues from past audits: 1) A failure to plan and perform audits with professional scepticism; and 2) Failure to obtain sufficient audit evidence.

Enforcement does seem to be improving, but there are still some issues as Robin Goodfellow pointed out (a failure to communicate with complainants over FRC findings or during investigations).

There is also an issue that fines on audit firms or partners are still not enough to discourage poor behaviour or match the losses incurred by shareholders due to incompetence or inadequacy. For example, one of the cases mentioned in the seminar was that of Autonomy. Deloitte was fined £15 million in September over their audit work for the company. But Hewlett-Packard (now HPE) claimed for £3.8 billion over their losses resulting from the acquisition of Autonomy, i.e. 250 times what Deloitte were fined!

Altogether these were somewhat disappointing seminars for those of us looking for vigorous action and speedy revolutions in the FRC. I am not convinced the culture of the FRC has yet changed, with progress being slow and decisive actions to improve audit standards not being implemented, although others do think there is progress being made. Improvements are being implemented but not nearly as quickly as I would like and auditors are still being protected from the worst impacts of incompetent audits. The fines that are issued are still too low – for example Deloitte registered a profit of £518m for the year ended May 2020 so they probably won’t worry too much about a £15 million fine.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson  )