No fraud, no dispute. The auditors resigned over the fee.

No fraud. No dispute. The auditors walked out anyway.

Written on 23 September 2026, based on public reports at that time.

In April this year, the statutory auditors of a listed company resigned. They were two years into a five year term.

Their letter did something unusual. It removed the obvious suspicion straight away. The resignation, they wrote, did not arise from any inability to obtain sufficient and appropriate audit evidence. They had not hit a wall with management.

They resigned over the fee.

They had proposed an increase. The company did not agree. So they said, in writing, that they could not do the audit properly at the lower fee given the time and effort involved, and stepped down.

Think how rare that is. Most auditors in that position do not resign.

When an audit fee is pushed below what the work actually costs, only three things can happen.

The auditor resigns. Rare, visible, and honest.

Or the auditor quietly does less work for less money. Fewer hours, smaller samples, more junior staff, less time on the difficult estimates. Nothing is announced. The report looks the same.

Or the auditor accepts the low fee and makes the relationship pay elsewhere, through tax work, advisory, certification, services to group companies. The firm stays profitable on your account. It just stops being only your auditor.

Only the first of those is visible to you. The other two look identical to a good audit, right up to the year they do not.

A Bill now before Parliament proposes to close the third door, restricting auditors from providing non audit services to the company, its holding company or subsidiary, and continuing that restriction for three years after the audit term ends.

So here is work for your next audit committee meeting.

Take two numbers from your own annual report. The audit fee. And the total paid to that firm and its network for everything else. If the second is a large multiple of the first, you have a question worth asking out loud.

Then ask the auditor the question nobody asks. Does this fee buy the hours this audit actually needs.

An audit fee is not a purchase. It is a statement about how much assurance you genuinely want.