An investigative report by Francine McKenna at re:The Auditors raises conflict of interest questions about PwC's IT implementation business.

Auditor independence is essential to audit work, but some of the Big 4 audit firms - or at least some of their partners - are not happy with their cosy oligopoly and want a piece of the more lucrative consulting and big project (especially IT) implementation market. That might be fine if they were not offering consultancy to clients they were also auditing, or auditing clients that they hoped to get consultancy work from.

Satyam, the Indian IT outsourcing company, housed one of the biggest accounting frauds discovered over the last year, and PwC was the auditor. In the report Francine reviews what appears to have been a strategic relationship between PwC and Satyam for the delivery of IT implementation services to PwC's IT consultancy clients.

Time to clamp down again on auditor independence?