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While recently introduced EU regulation on the statutory audit of public interest entities (PIEs) aims to improve audit competition and quality, its success and impact depends on the definition of a PIE applied across the various EU Member States. In the UK, even though little is known about their auditing choices, these changes will not apply to most private companies despite their importance to the wider economy. The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth analysis of the private company audit market and examine the lobbying behaviour of the accounting profession around the definition of a PIE in the UK.

Using a large panel of independent private company audits in the UK and a textual analysis of submitted comment letters to a government consultation on the new regulation, this paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the audit market for private companies by measuring supplier concentration using four different measures of market share, and of the lobbying behaviour of the accounting profession.

There are two main findings. First, the private company audit market is characterised by low auditor switching rates along with a tight oligopoly of the largest independent private company audits maintained by the Big Four audit firms. Second, the lobbying behaviour of accounting and audit firms sought, and succeeded, to limit the scope of the definition of a PIE in the UK, consistent with the theoretical predictions of monopoly capitalism and the theory of professions.

The paper shows that the definition and scope of a PIE needs revisiting both within the UK and across all EU Member States, with a view to including more of these economically important private companies and highlights the policy challenge of increasing competition and choice in a concentrated audit market.

IT is seldom that I can bring myself to write anything for publication, and as I had a longish article on “The education of librarians in Great Britain” printed as recently as 1964 in the Lucknow Librarian (which is edited by my friend Mr. R. P. Hingorani) I had not contemplated any further effort for some time to come. But as THE LIBRARY WORLD evidently wishes to cover all the British schools of librarianship it would be a pity for Brighton to be left out, even though, coming as it does towards the end of a gruelling series, I can see little prospect of this contribution being read. Perhaps, therefore, I need not apologise for the fact that, as my own life and fortunes have been (and still are) inextricably bound up with those of the Brighton school, any account which I write of the school is bound to be a very personal one.

FOR SOME YEARS there has been a tendency for the number of industrial workers to decline and that of clerical staffs to increase.

National Library Week was first launched in America in the spring of 1958 with the slogan “Wake Up and Read”. It is now an established, continuing, year‐round programme to help build a reading nation and to spur the use and improvement of libraries of all kinds. The sponsors seek the achievement of these objectives because they are the means of serving social and individual purposes that are immeasurably larger.

DULLNESS can be the aftermath of conferences, but Scarborough may be an exception. Some of the heat engendered at the Annual Business Meeting has indeed already evaporated, but its implications remain. They are these: that, while the examination system of the L.A. is to remain as it is for another two years, some revision is imperative; and the relations of the L.A. with the Association of Assistant Librarians must be so arranged that the latter can continue a distinctive existence. As for the examinations, resentment was felt not so much at the age‐limits, although these were the gravamen of the criticism against them, but against the undue severity of the Intermediate Examination, which, we are told, has delayed and impaired the careers of many quite capable young people. The severity, great as it seems in the two subjects, is increased by the requirement that both must be passed together. Only students exceptionally possessed of the examination faculty can do this, and we have the spectacle of several who have passed in each subject two or more times and yet have never been able to pass them together. The sanity of the requirement that they be passed together lies in the fact that it prevents cramming. Will anyone tell us the remedy?

‘A MAP OF THE WORLD that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at’ wrote Oscar Wilde. ‘It leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when it lands there it looks out and, seeing a better country, sets sail again. Progress is the realization of Utopias’.

NATIONAL Library Week was first launched in America in the spring of 1958 with the slogan “Wake Up and Read”. It is now an established, continuing, year‐round programme to help build a reading nation and to spur the use and improvement of libraries of all kinds. The sponsors seek the achievement of these objectives because they are the means of serving social and individual purposes that are immeasurably larger.

THE idea of a central service and supplies organisation for libraries—a “Library Centre”— such as exist abroad and are described in Library Supply agencies in Europe, is like most ideas in librarianship, not a new one, even taking into account the establishment of Norway's Biblioteksentralen over 60 years ago in 1902, which at that time was called Folkeboksamlingenes Ekspedisjon. This idea, like so so much else, seems to have originated in the fertile brain of Melvil Dewey, taking its final and lasting form as the Library Bureau, established by Dewey himself in 1882.