In an 18 December review of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), Sir John Kingman, chairman of the financial services group at Legal & General, called the agency “a hangover from a bygone era.” Kingman said the regulator should be replaced by a new body called the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority (ARGA) and should operate with “a new mandate, new clarity of mission, new leadership, and new powers.”
He compares the FRC to a “ramshackle house, cobbled together with all sorts of extensions over time” that is “serviceable, up to a point,” but which “is built on weak foundations”—so bad, in fact, that “some of the biggest and most important economic actors in the United Kingdom (i.e., audit firms) are still regulated not by an independent body but, in effect, by their trade association.”
