Sir, - Your daily reports on the DIRT inquiry make for reading which is at times fascinating but which also causes me professional concern. This stems from the difference between the reported responses of some professional firms of external auditors called before the inquiry and one's expectations of the standards of professional conduct to be brought to bear in a matter of this type.
We are here dealing with sophisticated businesses fully provided with internal check and control mechanisms. The firms been called to give evidence form a roll-call of the corps d'elite of my profession (or so their advertising puffs would lead us to believe). There are substantial sums of money in issue, of the order of millions of pounds, and the responsibilities of the auditors ought reasonably to encompass the position of the public purse which was potentially at risk of not receiving the sums of money properly due to it.
There were thus in place in this matter of DIRT in all those factors which entitled one to expect that all firms called upon to carry out external audit work would be mindful of an exceptionally strict duty of care imposed upon them.
The auditor, we recall from a celebrated legal dictum, is "a watchdog and not a bloodhound". That said, it is perturbing, reading the reported answers given to the DIRT enquiry, to form the suspicion that the standard of professional work by these external auditors was not up to what one would fairly expect to be the mark in their case. Indeed, some of their reported replies tend to indicate watchdogs who appeared to be variously toothless, deaf or partially sighted.
I recognise that the professional inquiries by the regulating institutes into these matters will no doubt reveal that these unfortunate perceptions of mine are totally unfounded. Nonetheless, I feel that it is vital in the public interest that the said institute should set out clearly to demonstrate to the wider public (who have a very "material" financial interest in the matter, after all) in the conduct of those inquiries that what is self-regulatory sauce for the small to medium firm goose should be self-regulatory sauce to the large accountancy firm gander. - Yours, etc.,
Philip G. Gormley, BSc, FCA, Chartered Accountant, Garden Street, Magherafelt, Co Derry.