who consent to play mind games with contingent liabilities for the (short-term) benefit of their clients, thereby abandoning any pretense of professional ethics.

and it's a cultural problem : much as doctors, for example, are presumed for cultural or historic reasons to always put the health of their patients first, we are expected to credit auditors with impeccable ethics and morals.

But these are not individual professionals who might suffer in reputation or income if they make bad calls on contingent liabilities. They are corporations which are often intimately bound with the entities they audit. So we add moral hazard to arm's length issues.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}