Updated List of Accounting Firm Average Partner Profits In the UK For 2021
Hey Grant Thornton UK partners, how y’all livin’? Probably not too bad these days, now that the average profit for those of you in the club went up 34% to £611,000 in 2021. With GT releasing its 2021 average partner pay yesterday, as well as firm profits and net revenue, we’ve updated our list of […]
FRC Fines Grant Thornton UK For Something We’re All Used to Grant Thornton UK Doing
A little over a month after being fined more than £2.3 million by the Financial Reporting Council for that whole Patisserie Valerie mess, Grant Thornton got called to the principal’s office once again for audit failures—this time for its 2015, 2016, and 2017 audits of outsourcing company Interserve, which went into administration in 2019. GT […]
Grant Thornton Let Off the Hook Big Time By UK’s Audit Cops
Back in August 2018, Grant Thornton UK was given a £4 million fine by the Financial Reporting Council (reduced to £3 million after a settlement discount) for a then-partner’s conflict of interest in serving on the audit committees of two audit clients, in addition to “widespread and serious inadequacies in the control environment in Grant […]
Grant Thornton Is Not a Bottom of the Barrel Firm, Says Grant Thornton
“The principle of shared audits is very attractive to challengers as long as the share of the audit is meaningful and brings incremental experience to teams. If the challenger firm is just going to get what’s left at the bottom of the barrel, that’s not interesting and doesn’t help.” — Fiona Baldwin, head of audit […]
Number of the Day: 88%
This is the percentage of the 4,500 or so employees of the Queen’s Grant Thornton who want to continue to spend the majority of their time working from home post-pandemic, an in-house employee survey revealed. According to the Financial Times, GT U.K. CEO David Dunckley said the pro-WFH crowd was the same regardless of age, […]
KPMG Poaches Someone From Grant Thornton and Issues a Press Release, Part III
There probably aren’t too many accountants who can say they’ve worked as head of tax at both Grant Thornton and KPMG in Scotland, but if such a club exists, Vishal Chopra is its newest member. Several news outlets in the U.K. have reported on Chopra’s recent move from GT to the House of Klynveld, including […]
Patisserie Valerie Liquidators Say Grant Thornton Doesn’t Deserve Cake
It was only a matter of time before Grant Thornton U.K. faced some sort of legal action for being the auditors of cake shop Patisserie Valerie while a massive accounting fraud was being committed right under their noses. According to the Financial Times on Jan. 8: The liquidators of Patisserie Valerie are suing Grant Thornton […]
Grant Thornton U.K.’s Latest Audit Inspection Report Is Out, and It’s Almost as Bad as Last Year’s
Welp, Grant Thornton’s 2019-20 audit quality inspection report from the Financial Reporting Council shows that GT hasn’t really gotten much better at audit quality in the past year. That’s kind of a problem when you’re the sixth-biggest accounting firm in the U.K. Last year the FRC was pretty unhappy with Grant Thornton after the firm’s […]
Grant Thornton U.K. Given Seven-Figure Fine For Totally Blowing Ethics and Independence Rules
In hockey if you get penalized for misconduct, you spend the next 10 minutes in the penalty box and feel shame. In auditing if you get penalized for misconduct, you pay some slap-on-the-wrist fine from a regulator, vow to be better next time, and go on your merry way. The Queen’s Grant Thornton is the […]
Grant Thornton Poaches Someone From EY and Issues a Press Release, Part I
While public accounting firms in the U.S. are registering about zero on the competitive poaching Richter scale these days, the bigger firms in the U.K. continue to shake things up. Take Grant Thornton, for example. Dan Dickinson, GT’s newest partner in its tax practice, is an EY refugee. From a press release seen by the […]
Layoff Watch ’20: Grant Thornton U.K. Is Forcing 70 Employees to Take Early Exits
Over the past three months, we’ve chronicled as best we could all the job cuts—which unfortunately have affected several thousands of professionals so far—that have occurred at U.S. public accounting firms during the coronavirus pandemic. Incredibly we haven’t been made aware of or read about any layoffs that have gone down at the biggest accounting […]
Another Grant Thornton U.K. Audit Was a Total Disaster
So say the folks at the Financial Reporting Council in the U.K., which fined Grant Thornton £650,000 earlier today for crapping up the audit of a publicly listed company in 2016. The name of the company wasn’t released by the FRC, which is bogus, and neither was the name of the engagement partner at GT […]
Layoff Watch ’19: Grant Thornton U.K. Cuts Reach the Partnership Level
Let’s face it, 2019 hasn’t been the best year for the Queen’s Grant Thornton, and neither was 2018. Let’s recap: 2018 Stopped bidding for new audit work at the largest U.K. companies. Patisserie Valerie accounting fraud; Grant Thornton was the auditor and is under investigation by the Finanical Reporting Council. Fined £3 million by the […]
Ex-Grant Thornton U.K. CEO Sacha Romanovitch Has a New Gig
The first female CEO of a major accounting firm in the U.K. won’t have to worry about partners stabbing her in the back in her new position as CEO of a financial inclusion organization called Fair4All Finance: We are happy to announce the appointment of our first CEO, Sacha Romanovitch. From 1st Sep she will […]
Why Grant Thornton Quitting As Auditor of Sports Direct Matters
In an ordinary midsummer news slump, only yawning disinterest would greet the July 29 news of Grant Thornton’s notice to the U.K. authorities of its intent to resign as auditor of troubled retailer Sports Direct International plc. The times are not ordinary; the cauldron of auditor criticism has bubbled since the collapse of Carillion in […]
U.K. Inspection Reports Reveal That Grant Thornton Can’t Audit Its Way Out of a Paper Bag
Here’s some good news for the 300 new auditors Grant Thornton in the U.K. is expecting to hire within the next 12 months: You can’t be any worse than the auditors GT has employed in recent years. The Financial Reporting Council released its annual audit inspection reports for the Big 4 firms, as well as […]
Hiring Watch ’19: Grant Thornton U.K. Is Looking For Competent Auditors to Fill 300 Jobs
Hey, auditors! How confident are you that you wouldn’t royally screw up auditing the financial statements of a well-known U.K. cafe chain and could uncover a £94 million accounting fraud? Pretty confident, eh? Well, you couldn’t do much worse than the dolts Grant Thornton U.K. had handling the audit work on Patisserie Valerie’s accounts. While […]