A sobering piece in the Sunday Times about how much accountants are cleaning up from Sarbanes-Oxley and IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards). Audit fees of the Big Four - PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst & Young - have been going up, and the accountants themselves are getting big pay rises. Mind you, you can't blame the accountants completely because resources are pretty stretched for all the extra work.

But it's also very much a function of large company assurance being in the hands of just four players. Unfortunately, that doesn't look like changing. Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Jim Peterson says it's about a public policy failure that enshrines the Big Four. Still, it's hard to see big corporates going against their instincts by engaging second-tier audit firms, or regulators developing audit protocols that embrace uncertainty. That ain't going to happen. Or should it?