It’s open season on auditors as others dodge the bullet

WHAT a difference a few hours make. Last night, KPMG’s bigwigs were happily schmoozing clients over bubbles and canapes at the Royal Academy’s Summer

Exhibition. This morning, they found themselves at the centre of yet another investigation into purportedly dodgy auditing work, this time at bust booze distributor Conviviality.

Auditors are getting a kicking of the likes not seen since the bankerbashing after the financial crisis, with KPMG getting the worst of it. From the HBOS Reading scandal to South Africa’s Guptagate to Carillion, KPMG is always there. It’s like Macavity the Mystery Cat’s incompetent twin brother.

However, before we jump to accuse it of messing up on Conviviality, it should be remembered that the Bargain Booze to Bibendum group was run by one of the most incompetent management teams of recent times.

This was, after all, a company that collapsed following a profit warning triggered by a mathematical error, then a failure to budget for a looming £30 million tax bill. And those disastrous errors were before KPMG had audited the books.

We expect auditors to safeguard investors and suppliers against bad managers, but how deeply should we expect them to delve? Must they check every calculation made by every employee? Surely not.

Yet increasingly, they’re getting the blame for corporate scandals as much as the corporates themselves.

Obviously, we should not let auditors off the hook if they’re found to be negligent or incompetent, but in the rush to condemn them, we risk letting directors slip away blameless.

Where, for example, is the high-