Following orders | By fulfilling his boss' instructions, a KPMG worker took the fall for a £14m scandal

A KPMG junior auditor has been told he should have questioned his managers' orders, after being instructed to forge documents as part of a bid to deceive regulators.

City A.M. reports that Pratik Paw, a 25-year-old junior accountant, was asked by his superiors to copy meeting minutes into an old document during a Financial Reporting Council (FRC) inspection of KPMG’s audit of the collapsed construction firm Carillion, in a bid to falsely represent them to the FRC with contemporaneous notes.

The probe heard that, in doing so, “Acted without the integrity required of an accountant and became a party to the deliberate misleading of the Audit Quality Review (AQR).”

Paw told the investigation that he simply followed his bosses’ instructions “without thought”, but the panel rejected his explanation, declaring that he should have known there was “no conceivable reason” why he would be asked to incorrectly date the minutes and that such an order “would have raised questions in anyone’s mind”.