Regular watchers of audit regulation will know that since 2005, auditors in the UK and Ireland have had to adhere to the auditor independence standards – Ethical Standards (ESs) – issued by the independent Auditing Practices Board (APB). The December 2004 version of these lasted until revised in April 2008, but the pace of change has since increased. There was a further change to ES3 on long association in October 2009 and another revision to other standards emerged on 17 December 2010. It is the intricacies of this last set of changes that I am looking to unravel here.