Áine Collins (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the fact that we are having a discussion on the proposals. As someone who operated as an auditor for many years the first point we should discuss is the role of the auditor. The role of the auditor is to report on a true and fair view of the set of accounts and also to identify any fraud if they discover it in the process of carrying out their audit. The role of the auditor is not to find fraud. Various checks and balances are carried out in the process of doing an audit. Various analyses are carried out. If one finds something then one digs a bit more in order to find third party evidence. It is not the role of the auditor to go into a company and find fraud but if fraud is discovered then the auditor must report it. It is important to clarify the position. If one has a company that is working against one and is hiding fraud at a deep level it can be difficult to find it, as we have discovered to our detriment in recent years. It is important to clarify the point in the context of the report. It is a good idea to have a mandatory requirement to change auditors every three to five years. That change would be welcome. However, I am concerned that because we have only four large auditing firms that companies would only be going from one to the other. Everyone knows everyone else in such small circles. That could be an issue to examine.

On the issue of having more small to medium sized audit firms taking on big audits, they are not in a position to do it. First, one must have a large number of people, which costs a lot of money. In addition, employees will not stay in smaller firms as they want to work in the big four. They want to travel and to get experience. That is where they aspire to be, as that is where they will get the most experience. Small to medium sized organisations do not have the capability to carry out some of the big audits and they would not be sufficiently independent. I qualified as an auditor in 1996 and since then a significant amount of change and new regulation was introduced and the responsibilities on auditors have become onerous to say the least.