Peter Martin on 1 December 2011:
The two Perth accountants who costed the Coalition’s 2010 election policies breached professional standards and will be fined, a disciplinary tribunal has ruled.
The ruling is an embarrassment to the Coalition which claimed during the campaign the costing was “as good as you could get anywhere in the country, including in Treasury." In recent months it has threatened to use private accountants once again.
Geoffrey Phillip Kid and Cyrus Patell, both of the Perth office of WHK Horwath produced a one-page report for the Coalition two days before the election which Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey tendered as an audit, saying the pair had certified “in law that our numbers are accurate".
“If the fifth-biggest accounting firm in Australia signs off on our numbers it is a brave person to start saying there are accounting tricks,” he told ABC radio. “I tell you it is audited. This is an audited statement.’’
In fact the document was the result of a carefully-worded agreement between the accountants and the Coalition to produce work primarily "not of an audit nature".
An audit would examine the assumptions used by the Coalition and whether they were reasonable.
Kidd and Patell’s unpublished agreement with the Coalition explicity required them to make no inquires about “the reasonableness of otherwise of the assumptions used"...
A professional conduct tribunal established by the Institute of Chartered Accountants ruled in July that Kidd and Patel were liable to face disciplinary action because their one-page report failed to contain “a statement that the procedures performed do not constitute either an audit or a review” and so failed to properly describe the limited nature of the agreed upon procedures…
The ruling is an embarrassment to the Coalition which claimed during the campaign the costing was “as good as you could get anywhere in the country, including in Treasury." In recent months it has threatened to use private accountants once again.
Geoffrey Phillip Kid and Cyrus Patell, both of the Perth office of WHK Horwath produced a one-page report for the Coalition two days before the election which Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey tendered as an audit, saying the pair had certified “in law that our numbers are accurate".
“If the fifth-biggest accounting firm in Australia signs off on our numbers it is a brave person to start saying there are accounting tricks,” he told ABC radio. “I tell you it is audited. This is an audited statement.’’
In fact the document was the result of a carefully-worded agreement between the accountants and the Coalition to produce work primarily "not of an audit nature".
An audit would examine the assumptions used by the Coalition and whether they were reasonable.
Kidd and Patell’s unpublished agreement with the Coalition explicity required them to make no inquires about “the reasonableness of otherwise of the assumptions used"...
A professional conduct tribunal established by the Institute of Chartered Accountants ruled in July that Kidd and Patel were liable to face disciplinary action because their one-page report failed to contain “a statement that the procedures performed do not constitute either an audit or a review” and so failed to properly describe the limited nature of the agreed upon procedures…
Read the rest here.
