Wyman says UK house is in order
ICAEW president Peter Wyman says that while Enron was a wake-up call for 'boards, investors and auditors', the UK house is 'largely in order'.
Link: Wyman warns of ‘high-profile corporate casualties’
Writing in The Times yesterday, Wyman said no one should be surprised that there was not an Enron scandal in the UK.
He said the country had already dealt with its own scandals a decade ago.
Going back to the big corporate disasters of last year – WorldCom and Enron – Wyman said they were not typical of corporate America, ‘but grotesque cases of what can happen if personal greed and corporate excess go unchallenged’.
Similarly, he claimed that disgraced and defunct auditor Andersen in the US had ‘attributes not found in other auditors’.
Wyman said 2003 would see the US struggle with the ‘bodged’ Sarbanes-Oxley Act, while the world would struggle with its ‘unintended extra-territorial consequences’.