The FRC has fined Grant Thornton £40,000 over failures in a reviewed audit, which it considered represented a significant departure from the standards expected.
The FRC’s enforcement committee said the firm failed to comply with the regulatory framework for auditing in its audit of a local authority’s pension fund for the year ending 31 March 2021. And, these failures had the potential to affect the public, employees, pensioners, or creditors.
The problems included two uncorrected material errors which appeared in the version of the pension fund’s audited financial statements that was included in the local authority’s annual report (these errors did not appear in the pension fund’s own financial statements) and insufficient audit evidence obtained that the value of investments was materially accurate.
