On 17 June 2016 a new EU Regulation came into effect that governs specific requirements regarding statutory audit of public-interest entities, or ‘PIEs’. This new Regulation makes it mandatory for PIEs to rotate their audit firms and to separate their audit and advisory services. A similar arrangement is in place under Dutch law. Realising that offering audit and advisory services together was an outmoded concept, a group of former partners from the BIG 4 set up HVK Stevens Tax. Their vision was to offer tax advice that is independent from the auditors. Now the firm’s practice is seeing this exact same trend: being required to separate their auditors from their tax advisers, PIEs are looking at alternatives to the traditional BIG 4 audit firms.
