New regulator commits to major probes

Imre Nagy, appointed this week as the permanent CEO of the Independent Regulatory Board for Auditors (Irba), has formulated his battle plan. He has been acting in the role for 18 months, since the unceremonious departure of Jenitha John amid an uproar over her role as chair of the audit committee of Tongaat Hulett during a bone-crushing accounting scandal. Nagy carries no such baggage. A registered auditor, he worked at PwC before joining Gobodo (now known as SNG Grant Thornton), before joining Irba in 2013. ‘In the past 18 months, while I’ve been acting CEO, we’ve pretty much just got on with business,’ he told the Financial Mail. ‘We’ve stabilised the regulator and refocused on restoring confidence in the profession.’ The profession has been in the eye of the storm, as crooked auditors (KPMG at VBS Mutual Bank), epic errors (Deloitte at Tongaat Hulett and Steinhoff) and amateur blunders (PwC at SAA) chipped away at its credibility. Nagy says SA’s profession is in a far better place than it was five years ago, when it was wrong-footed by a cascade of auditing failures. He is targeting completing investigations into high-profile audit failures at Steinhoff and Tongaat Hulett within the next six months so that disciplinary action can be instituted. ‘We’ve set ourselves the goal that by the end of March next year we’ll have completed the initial investigations into Tongaat and Steinhoff and progressed with the hearing into Sharemax. Then, if these go to a disciplinary hearing, that has its own time frame,’ he added.