The UK’s accounting regulator has fined PwC £1.8m over its audit of FTSE 100 telecoms company BT.
PwC’s fine from the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) was cut from £2.5m after it quickly admitted the failure.
Richard Hughes, the partner in charge of the BT audit, has been fined £42,000, cut from £60,000.
The FRC said: “the respondents did not approach the audit of BT’s treatment of the debt adjustments with the necessary professional scepticism and they failed to adequately document their audit work across the entirety of the BT Italy adjustments.”
The auditors’ breaches were not found to have been “intentional, dishonest, deliberate or reckless”, but the FRC said they were breaches of important standards.
Claudia Mortimore, the FRC’s deputy executive counsel, said: “In determining the financial impact of a major fraud detected within a business, difficult but important issues relating to appropriate accounting treatment and disclosures will need to be addressed. It is vital that these are subject to robust audit so that the users of financial statements can have confidence that the financial impact is properly and accurately stated in subsequent financial statements.
“The sanctions imposed in this case, where certain elements of the adjustments following a fraud were not subject to the required level of professional scepticism, underscore this message and will serve as a timely reminder to the profession.”
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