Richard Brooks: How accountants got away with murder

Often perceived as dull, the secretive world of international accountancy has grown, cockroach-like, in stature even as the financial world crashed in 2008. Safe from real censure, the world’s biggest accountancy firms have evolved into behemoths – there to encourage tax avoidance, to prop up anti-democratic movements, to push sometimes damaging deregulation, even to infiltrate the machinery of the state. Richard Brooks came to the CIJ to talk about how bean counters lurched from the professional watchdogs of capitalism into its cheerleaders and the architects of its biggest crises, and what that means for everyone else.

Chair: Tom Sanderson, CIJ.

This talk was hosted at Goldsmiths, University of London, as part of the #LOGANCIJ Talks Series.

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