Ethics is far more than an incidental feature of the auditing framework. It is actually its very essence. In virtually every instance of audit failure that finds its way into the public domain, whether it concerns undetected management fraud, money laundering, accounting manipulations, bogus claims, insider trading, you name it, we find that the cause of such failure is rarely technical incompetence.

It is rather the all-consuming moral haze in which first principles of independent sceptical assessment have been sidelined in favour of commercial expediency.