'Cosy cabal' of accountants to be grilled by politicians over self-regulation and apparent conflicts of interest.

. . . As bankers take a kicking from an increasingly irate public, auditors have avoided the anger, even though they signed off trillion-dollar balance sheets, sanctioned increased dividends in bank shares that collapsed months later, blithely assumed markets would function seamlessly and established controversial rules that inflated bubbles and amplified losses. . .

A trawl through the list of failed banks reveals the same audit names over and over again, because multinational auditing is the near-exclusive preserve of four firms - PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Ernst & Young and Deloitte & Touche.

The roll call of shamed institutions links PricewaterhouseCoopers to Northern Rock, Landsbanki, Carlyle Capital Corporation and Glitnir. Deloitte & Touche signed off Alliance & Leicester, RBS and Bear Stearns. KPMG did the numbers for HBOS, Kaupthing, and Bradford & Bingley, while Ernst & Young had the big one: Lehman Brothers.  25-Oct-09.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/25/auditors-role-financial-crisis