‘Making Tomorrow a Better Place’? Carillion as a Window on the Dark Side of Audit in the System of Company Regulation

Abstract

The focus of this study is upon the UK system of company regulation and corporate governance, with specific reference to auditing and the role of auditors. It examines how, during a Parliamentary inquiry that followed the dramatic and unexpected collapse of Carillion, a major UK company. It shows how members of the Big 4 accounting firms and other participants, including management, regulators and Secretaries of State, justified and defended their actions. Oriented by Glynos and Howarth’s (2007) Logics of Critical Explanation framework, its detailed analysis conjectures that the recurrent theme of the inquiry was not the restoration of confidence or trust, as is typically presumed, but the allocation and avoidance of blame, together with the deflection of attention from the system of company regulation.

Keywords: Corporate collapses, public inquiries, Big 4 firms, Poststructuralist Discourse Theory.