Any accountant who has had to manually collate all of a company’s financial statements will know what a headache it can be.

With so much at stake, you have to make sure every transaction and forecast is accurate, up-to-date, pre-empted and explained. After all, an auditor can only fulfil their duty of ‘upholding trust and integrity in business by providing opinions on financial statements’ if the financial statements are correct in the first place.

The fact that the UK is going through tough economic conditions adds another layer of complexity. For one thing, auditors need to be even more alert to the risk of misstatement and insider fraud as economic uncertainty could tempt unscrupulous managers to falsify financial information.