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Disciplinary update: November 2023

Author: Professional Standards

Published: 06 Nov 2023

Take note of the latest disciplinary cases to ensure you or your firm are not making similar mistakes.

Since the last update, twelve consent orders made by the Conduct Committee have been published.

Ten orders related to provisional members at one firm who participated in a group chat where an assessment answer document was created, added to, used and/or shared to assist with the completion of the assessments set out below, which they were required to complete by their employer when they knew, or should have known, they should not share answers or use answers shared by others:

  1. Audit Strategy v1; and/or
  2. Evaluating Results, Overall Conclusion Analytics, Auditing Presentation; and
  3. Disclosure v1.

This conduct was contrary to subsection 115.1 of the ICAEW Code of Ethics – Professional Behaviour (effective from 1 January 2020).

Each of the ten provisional members were severely reprimanded and required to pay costs of £2,107.

The other two orders published this month related to:

A member who was reprimanded and fined £630 because they failed to notify the ICAEW Members’ Registrar of the formation of their corporate practice as required by the following regulations:

  1. within 10 business days as required by Practice Assurance regulation 13 (effective from 1 July 2019); and/or
  2. within 28 days as required by the Information to be supplied by members regulation 3 (effective from 1 December 2010).

And a member was reprimanded and fined £1,400 because they had:

  • engaged in public practice for two and a half years without holding a practising certificate contrary to Principal Bye-law 51a;
  • engaged in public practice through their firm, without the minimum level of professional indemnity insurance as required by regulation 3.2 and/or 3.3 of the Professional Indemnity Insurance (PII) Regulations (effective 29 May 2020); and
  • failed to notify the ICAEW Members’ Registrar of the formation of their firm within 28 days as required by the Information to be supplied by members regulation 3 (effective from 1 December 2010).

Both of the above were also required to pay costs.

Further details can be found on our Disciplinary Database or please visit our Public Hearings page.