Friction #4: The auditor’s dilemma

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Editor's note: No one loves auditors. They are the elephant men of business. Companies treat them as freak shows that must be tolerated while shareholders consider them to be nitpickers and party poopers. Why, even auditors themselves view their audit services as an albatross hung around their necks.  Indeed, if the Big Four audit firms—Deloitte & Touche, EY, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)—all of whom do business in India through their affiliates, had their way, they would probably drop audit services from their portfolios altogether. It may have been the reason why most of them came into being in the first place but lately, and that’s going back nearly 10 years, it has brought them nothing but grief while contributing less than 15% of their total revenues. A slew of corporate scandals over the last few years have turned the heat up so intensely on the final arbiters of a company’s declared numbers that many of them now do a risk assessment of potential clients before signing on for the job. Yet auditing has a beauty of its own. Says a former auditor, …