The banking regulator’s latest circular seems to be another attempt at fixing auditors while ignoring the issues that plague audit quality.
No company collapses due to an audit failure and no company collapses without an audit failure. Nearly every recent case of fraud has proved this adage true. So, it was in the natural order of things that the Reserve Bank of India, in a circular in April, tried to bring auditors in general, and the Big 4 audit firms in particular, to heel.
The Punjab National Bank scam of 2017-18, in which the government is spending crores to bring the fugitive diamantaire duo of Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi home to face justice, involved an internal audit failure. The Rs …
Jayshree is a former writer at The Morning Context. As journalist, she had nearly a decade of experience across Mint, Business Standard and Bloomberg TV India. The bulk of her career has been devoted to tracking the capital markets regulator, exchanges, regulatory policies, financial scams and corporate governance issues. One of her biggest breaking stories was her incisive coverage of the colocation scam which put the lapses at NSE in the public domain.
jayshree@mailtmc.com