PwC Aarata took a big gamble last year when it took over the audit of Toshiba’s scandal-marred accounts. Its predecessor Ernst & Young ShinNihon had incurred heavy reputational damage after regulators in 2015 accused the accounting firm of failing to detect that the Japanese industrial conglomerate had inflated its profits by $1.3bn over seven years.
It was a risky wager but one that also posed an opportunity for PwC, which has the smallest share of the Japanese auditing market among the Big Four accounting firms. PwC’s client list — although it includes Sony and Toyota — covers only 3 per cent of Tokyo’s public companies. read the rest here