A finance director I know spent three weeks this summer reading regulatory bulletins she'd normally skim in ten minutes.

Two stories had landed within a few weeks of each other, and both were about auditors getting caught out. EY was fined just over £1.19million by the Financial Reporting Council over its audit of Made.com, reduced down from an original £1.8million because the firm admitted the failings early, as Accountancy Age reported at the time.

Thin audit evidence around going concern assumptions and deferred tax sat at the centre of the case. The engagement partner on the job, Julie Carlyle, picked up a personal fine of £49,000 on top. Weeks later the FRC opened an investigation into KPMG's audit of John Wood Group for the 2023 financial year, alongside separate enquiries into two individual accountants.

Same regulator, same summer, two of the Big Four in the space of a month.

A pattern, not a headline

None of this is really about EY or KPMG specifically. But big firms get fined occasionally and the world tends to move on fast. What's harder to ignore is the machinery underneath it, the part that doesn't make the headline.

The FRC's updated Audit Enforcement Procedure came into force in July. It was built to move cases faster and surface findings sooner rather than let them drag on for years the way some of the old ones did.

Accountancy Age noted that penalties across the sector had already topped £14.5million the year before this latest round even landed. So it isn't a one-off. It's a regulator that has decided the old pace wasn't good enough anymore.

And that's where this stops being an audit story and starts being a hiring one.

Why does an audit fine matter to whoever's hiring the next financial controller?

The standard the auditor gets held to is, most of the time, a rough mirror of the standard your own finance function is expected to meet. Going concern judgement. Deferred tax treatment. The paper trail behind a number, not only the number itself.

When the regulator sharpens its teeth on the audit side, the finance team on the other side of that audit feels the temperature change first. Weak documentation. A judgement call nobody wrote down properly. Or a controller who can produce the right number but can't quite explain how they got there.

It gets found out faster now than it did two years ago.

I've sat across the table from a fair few finance directors this year who assumed their existing team would just absorb whatever extra scrutiny showed up.

Some will. Plenty won't, mostly because nobody ever actually tested for it in the first place.

What should you actually be testing for in a financial controller interview?

Not just whether the numbers balance. Ask a candidate to walk you through a properly difficult judgement call from a previous close, one where reasonable people could have landed on different answers. Listen for whether they can defend the reasoning rather than just recite the outcome.

A controller who points back to the audit sign-off as their entire justification is telling you something. The one who can explain why they made the call, what they'd do differently under pressure, and where the documentation actually lives, is telling you something else entirely.

This is a bit that gets missed on a lot of job specs.

Employers write "strong technical accounting background" and stop there, as if the qualification alone answers the question. Most job specs never actually spell out what to look for in a financial controller beyond the letters after their name.

ACA, ACCA and CIMA all produce technically capable people on paper. But what they don't guarantee is someone who's actually been tested under the kind of scrutiny landing on their profession every few months now.

Where a specialist recruiter earns the fee

A generalist agency can source a CV with the right letters after the name. Most can do that in a week.

What a specialist finance recruiter should do is know the difference between a candidate who has merely survived an audit and one who's properly comfortable being cross-examined by one. That difference rarely shows up on paper. It shows up in how someone answers the third follow-up question, not the first one, and that's a hard thing to screen for if hiring senior finance isn't something you do every month.

Fair warning, that distinction is hard to test for on your own too, and it isn't a knock on internal HR or a hiring manager doing their best. It's a niche skill, reading finance leaders under regulatory pressure, and most businesses only need to do it once every few years.

The gap between qualified and ready

There's a pipeline problem sitting underneath all of this too, one we've written about before. Fewer people are staying the course through ACA, ACCA and CIMA qualification than a decade ago. Which means the pool of financial controllers with real audit-facing experience is thinner than most job specs still assume.

You're not just competing for the best candidate anymore. Now you're competing for one of a shrinking number who've actually been through a tough audit cycle and come out able to explain it calmly.

Or, put another way, the scarcity is exactly why the interview has to work harder than it used to. A polished CV and a clean reference used to be enough signal. It isn't now, not when the regulator has made it clear that documentation and judgement get checked rather than assumed.

None of that means panic.

It means being honest about what qualified actually covers, and what it quietly leaves out.

Where this leaves you if you're hiring

If you're currently looking at a financial controller or finance director hire, and wondering whether your process tests for the right things, have that conversation before the role goes live.

Not after a weak appointment six months in.

At Coburg Banks we run finance searches at controller, FD and CFO level across the UK. The candidates we put in front of clients have been through exactly this kind of scrutiny before we ever introduce them. Send us the brief and we'll tell you honestly whether the market for that role is as tight as it currently feels.

And if you're a controller or finance director reading this and wondering where you'd sit against that bar, our current finance vacancies are worth a look too.

You can read more about how we approach finance recruitment on our sector page. We also covered the qualification pipeline squeeze in more depth in an earlier piece on the accountant shortage, if you want the fuller picture.