The law of unintended consequences suggests that intervention in a complex system always creates unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes. This is certainly the case with the proposals for increasing the usefulness of audit tabled by the Financial Reporting Council and the European Commission in its green paper, Audit Policy: Lessons from the Crisis. Far from intended or serendipitous consequences of increased transparency and quality of audit, some of the proposals could lead to greater opacity, lower quality and an increase in the kind of perceived systemic risk to the financial markets that the proposals were intended to mitigate.