The Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Parliamentary Committee held a pre-appointment hearing to take evidence from the UK government’s preferred candidate for the post of chair of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), Simon Dingemans, on 17 July 2019.
Among the proposals put forward to shake up the UK’s audit processes in the wake of the failures notably of BHS and Carillion, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) called for leading listed companies to hire two auditors to jointly check accounts. However, “I am not convinced at this stage if joint audit is the answer,” Dingemans told the committee.
“There is a very different appetite for change… an opportunity that hasn’t existed before to make very radical change,” he said, adding that he wanted ‘to build a very different regulator, a very different organisation with skills and capabilities, and most importantly, powers and teeth that it's prepared to use to change its focus to really drive towards serving the end users of accountants, as opposed to repairers of accounts, but most importantly, to change the culture of the organisation, to make it more proactive, more energetic, more challenging’.
