The head of audit at the UK’s sixth-largest accounting firm has called for tighter restrictions on the range of services auditors can offer their clients amid growing concerns about conflicts of interest in the audit market.
Scott Knight, head of audit at BDO, said new European rules limiting the amount of non-audit work that accounting firms can offer to their listed audit clients have not gone far enough and called for harsher restrictions.
These rules, which came into force in the UK in 2016, restricted non-audit fees to 70 per cent of the audit fees billed over the previous three years. The aim was to address the concern that auditors might gloss over client problems in their reports in order to protect the high fees earned from providing ancillary services such as tax…
