Ritchie is simply beastly about cuddly Graham Ward:

This is a man who has gone out of his way to promote International Financial Reporting Standards, which are widely acknowledged to have helped precipitate the current financial crisis.

I don't agree.  How did they precipitate the crisis exactly?  Managers don't use the financial report to manage the business.  They use management accounts, so it's probably there that we should start our search for the true cause of the crisis.  Not in IFRS. 

This is a man who helped promote new international auditing standards which debased the audit so that it no longer represented the expression of opinion on the true and fair view shown by a set of accounts ,but became a simple checklist on compliance with the disclosure requirements of IFRS.

The Financial Reporting Council is of the opinion that the meaning of 'true and fair' is unchanged by IFRS or the Companies Act 2006 or ISAs.  And they have a snazzy opinion from Martin Moore QC to back them up.

This is a man whose firm audited Northern Rock.

This is a man whose firm audited Granite, the shadow bank of Northern Rock; a shadow that was owned by a trust set up for the benefit of a children’s charity in the north-east of England that had no knowledge of the abuse of its name for that purpose.

This is a man whose firm promotes deregulation whenever it can.

This is a man whose firm promotes indirect rather than direct taxation in developing countries, so the poor pay most.

This is a man whose firm is present in every single major tax haven in  the world,even though it has been shown that tax havensare fundamental in undermining development.

This is a man whose firm sells vast quantities of tax avoidance advice – advice designed to undermine the income stream of governmentswhen that income is essential to the delivery of effective international development support and the delivery of healthcare, education and other services in developing countries.

This is a man whose firm promotes what they call the “total tax contribution” - a bogus accounting concept that adds up all the payments that a company makes to a tax authority,whether on its own behalf or on behalf of others when acting as agent, and then uses the utterly meaningless resulting number as the basis for a demand for the reduction of its corporate tax burden.

This is a man whose firm opposes country by country reporting even though the vast majority of the major development agencies in the world now supported because they believe it good help monitor transfer pricing abuse,illicit financial flows,and could help developing countries collect the taxes that they are owed.

Yeah, Ritchie, mate.  There's a little clue in your own article that might help you here, before you make an even bigger fool of yourself.  And that's the disclosure that he retired from PwC in January this year.

Now, okay, there may be one or two people who don't believe that people who leave big audit firms ever lose their association with that firm.  You might be thinking that once in the Big Four, rather like the Hotel California, you can check out but you can never leave.

If you do believe that, then presumably we must similarly wonder at the motives of another former Big Four employee, one Richard J. Murphy (for it is he), who trained in KPMG.  No doubt everything he says reflects his continuing devotion to his former firm.

And if Ritchie can shake off being a Big Four alumnus, why not Graham Ward?

And for all these reasons,I’m sorry to say that I do not think that this is a man who is due to hold the position for which is being considered.

I'm sure the House of Commons International Development Committee will make up their own minds on an objective assessment of the evidence.  Which won't include Ritchie's shabby, clumsy character assassination.

You can listen to the hearing here (I couldn't get the video to work, but the sound was working).

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Filed under: Other blogs, Politics with tags frc, graham ward, idiots, ifac, kpmg, martin moore, northern rock, pricewaterhousecoopers, qc, richard murphy, true and fair