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Folks,
I have to do a debate in college on the subject 'That the amount of non-audit fees earned by professional accountancy firms is damaging to the practice of accounting and accountability.'
Since i'm struggling to get info on the damned thing, I thought i'd pop in here and see if anyone can give me any insight, point me in the direction of a couple of sites etc...
???
Possibly to do with conflict of interests? As in accounting firms doing audits for companies, but also doing tax work, legal work, management advice, bank presentations, etc. If you're doing all that, you're going to be on good terms with the client and maybe more involved than you should be, and that might make it harder to maintain objectivity in the audit.
Websites - dunno really. Try icai.ie for starters, I suppose.
Stu has it right. Andersen and Enron was the biggest case of this in recent years. If an accounting firm is earning huge fees for consulting or tax work they are less likely to disagree with the client on any contentious accounting issues, Enron's off balance sheet entities being a prime example. Enron basically hid a load of losses in these companies that were not consolidated into the results of Enron itself. By right the entities should have been included in Enron's results but Andersen let them off the hook and signed their accounts anyway. Not sure of the exact percentages but Andersen were earning huge fees for consulting along with their audit fees. Andersens conviction was eventually overturned however.