The beleaguered audit regulator, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), is planning to ask the next government for new powers to set auditor remuneration rates

PwC has failed in a High Court bid to ward off a pending multimillion euro negligence claim against the Big Four firm

South African retail giant Steinhoff international, which owns Poundland in the UK, has hired Mazars Netherlands as auditor, replacing Deloitte

Following a formal tender process, FTSE listed global engineering company Trifast has hired BDO LLP as auditor ending a 24-year relationship with KPMG

Babycare retailer Mamas & Papas has been sold in a pre-pack administration handled by Deloitte, with the assets bought back by its owner Bluegem Capital partners as creditors lose out

FTSE 100 listed global mining conglomerate BHP has ended its 23-year audit relationship with KPMG, hiring fellow Big Four giant EY

Wirecard has extended the scope of a KPMG independent audit as it seeks to end speculation it has manipulated its accounts, the German digital payments specialist has reported

The next government must bring forward legislation as soon as possible to replace the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) with the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority (ARGA)

The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has signalled a crackdown on audit firms who fail to improve the quality of their work and is threatening to publish individual audit scores in the next Audit Quality Inspection reports in mid 2020

Big Four firm KPMG has denied that it is planning to cut around a tenth of its partners in a bid to get the firm back on track and improve performance, saying that around 50-60 partners leave the firm each year through natural churn 

Big Four firms now have total domination of the FTSE 100 audit market as mid-tier presence is squeezed out of the market. Philip Smith analyses the £700m plus audit market, highlighting the risk of substantial audit fee price rises after year-one audit wins and the impact of second-cycle audit tendering on competition

In this month’s audit updates, FRC fines leap 44%, MPs grill auditors over Thomas Cook, PwC in $7.9m independence fine, Kingman warns of reform drift while Brydon hits out at ‘shotgun’ approach, BDO predicts 25% audit fee hike, public demands ‘more teeth’ at regulator as new team take over and going concern audit standard is ‘toughened’

Reform of the UK audit market is long overdue with the tripartite Kingman, Brydon and CMA reviews still not implemented. Katharine Bagshaw FCA asks whether a UK version of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) would work with its harsh penalties for lack of corporate oversight 

The Big Four firms have increased their grip on the UK audit market, reporting a 4.7% hike in total fee income to £10.95bn compared to an 8.1% drop at mid-tier audit firms