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This article was first published in the September 2016 UK edition of Accounting and Business magazine.

Imagine you moved back, after a six-year absence, to the house you grew up in. Many things would be the same, but you might not be too surprised if the furniture had been changed and rearranged, and perhaps a couple of walls knocked down to open up the space.

It must have felt a bit like that for Sue Almond when she returned last autumn to Grant Thornton UK, the firm where she had practised for more than 20 years. Having left as national assurance services partner in 2009, she came back as head of UK audit and assurance last September. In between, she had done a two-year stint at accountancy network Kreston International and four years in different roles at ACCA. ‘In some ways it was like I’d never been away, and in other ways the firm had changed ever such a lot,’ she says.

Just weeks before Almond returned to the fold, Sacha Romanovitch had taken up the reins as the firm’s CEO. Other changes included the firm now offering a wider range of services. Probably the biggest change of all, though, was that the firm had developed ‘a much more collaborative way of working’.

Almond says that people are ‘more prepared to ask for help and speak to each other’. At the firm’s assurance conference a few days after she rejoined, it was really noticeable in the breakout sessions, she says. ‘There was a lot of group work and more willingness to engage.’

The reason for the change, she adds, is partly the tone from the top, but also a generational shift among staff. ‘Younger people tend to work in that kind of collaborative environment,’ she says.

Before returning to Grant Thornton, Almond spent four years at ACCA as technical director and then director of external affairs. Much of her time was spent dealing with an issue that, today, continues to shape audit firms’ operations in Europe: the European Commission’s move to regulate the audit profession.

Reforming impulse

Audit reform became a high priority for the commission during the financial crisis. In 2010, it proposed mandatory auditor rotation and restriction of audit services in its green paper Audit policy: Lessons from the crisis.

A year later, the EU’s internal markets commissioner Michel Barnier declared: ‘Investor confidence in audit has been shaken by the crisis. I believe changes in this sector are necessary: we need to restore confidence in the financial statements of companies.’ He proposed banning ‘Big Four only’ clauses in contracts.

Almond says ACCA had a particularly important role as ‘honest broker’ in helping the Commission understand the implications of its proposals. ACCA’s membership covers the full spectrum, with members in practice at large and small firms, in business and in the public sector. ‘You’re able to get the views of that broad constituency and then present that in a way that is perceived differently from any particular firm that may have a particular agenda,’ she says.

ACCA’s broad membership and ‘excellent, well-connected Brussels office’ made it easier to assemble the views of people ‘for whom audit quality is really important – people like investors and the voices of business – so that the people who were making the legislation were able to get a complete picture as to what these proposals meant and the reality of what was going on.

‘Gradually over time politicians realised that some of the proposals were impractical and that a few key issues need to be looked at. And so it got gradually funnelled down to more manageable areas.’

She says a key takeaway from the whole exercise is the importance of getting across audit’s public interest aspect. ‘The big issue for the profession is trust – making it very clear that there is a public interest element to the audit role.’

Auditor value

For Almond, there are at least two ways of addressing that, now that she’s back at Grant Thornton. One is ‘to work with businesses, regulators, all sorts of stakeholders, to help shape the dynamic businesses that we want to see in future’.

The other is deeper engagement on what the true value of an audit is. That value, she says, comes from having ‘an independent, inquiring mindset. It’s about the quality of the conversations with clients and the challenge that you have with them.’

The small companies audit threshold has been raised recently, but while the headlines shout about sparing businesses red tape, Almond says the reality is different. ‘When a company is no longer required to have an audit, it changes the nature of the dialogue and, if anything, makes it easier to explain why an audit is of value to the client.

‘It allows us perhaps to put the relationship on a more constructive footing than when you have this mandatory audit requirement that just says, “I have to do this to you”. You can have a conversation about what is it that is really of value to the client.’

With stricter regulations on the types of non-audit work that large and listed companies can award to their auditors, Grant Thornton has its eye on growth beyond FTSE 100 group audits. It plans to raise its fee income from £500m revenue in 2015 to around £800m by 2020.

The firm is providing assurance and other non-audit work for 52% of the FTSE 100, although this work is much less visible than high-profile FTSE 100 group audit fees, creating a discrepancy between perception and reality. ‘We are actually working with the same businesses [as the Big Four], but not in the public arena,’ says Almond.

The extension of her role from audit to broader assurance reflects how the firm intends to grow. ‘People are looking for assurance on other things: supply chains, key performance indicators, modern slavery, carbon emissions. We are looking very much at the whole broader trust agenda and how we are developing to work on that.’

Not only is the Grant Thornton office intellectually more open plan than when Almond left, but the greater breadth of work and global reach of its growth strategy will make the world her office.

Andrew Sawers, journalist