Time spent dealing with regulatory change is amounting to nearly one day a week for UK accountants while one in four executives claim their teams know 'little or nothing' about regulation.

The survey by Robert Half polled CFOs and COOs in UK financial service firms found that 18% of the working week was spent on coping with the changes to the regulatory landscape, with 59% stating they spent 'more' or 'significantly more' time on this than they did three years ago.

The executives believe they can not rely on their teams to support them in their efforts to manage the excessive amounts of regulatory change, with 38% of the opinion that their staff are not very or not at all knowledgeable.

The least knowledgeable are medium sized companies with half (50%), followed by small companies at (39%) and only a fifth (22%) of executives at large financial service businesses concerned at the lack of staff understanding of regulation.

Overall UK teams appear to be considerably less capable than overseas companies, with 89% of Hong Kong executives and 82% in Germany who say their teams are 'somewhat' or 'very' knowledgeable.

Neil Owen, global practice director, Robert Half financial services said: 'Senior financial service professionals face a real dilemma: they have no choice but to manage the huge workload that regulatory change represents, but also find that their teams lack the necessary knowledge to keep their companies on top of it all.

This is having a severe impact on their own workload because a whole day every week is being devoted to regulatory compliance - a huge chunk of their time.'