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UK audit watchdog will investigate EY over Made.com

It was funny when Meta laid off employees who made ‘day in the life’ videos in which they were tucked into bed at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday. But Buzzfeed laying off its Pulitzer-Prize-winning news team hit a little too close to home given Balance Sheet has not even won a Pulitzer yet and I just used Afterpay to buy a new couch.

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Credit: UK watchdog as imagined by Midjourney

UK audit watchdog will investigate EY over Made.com

The UK’s Financial Reporting Council has announced that it will investigate EY's audit of collapsed furniture retailer Made.com. The probe will focus on the FY21 audit for which EY was paid £1.4 million.

From the outside, although Made.com collapsed, the audit does not appear to have involved any egregious errors (such as the alleged failure to confirm the existence of $2 billion held in an offshore bank account). Instead, Made.com appears to have been caught out by a drop off in demand post pandemic.

Supply chain constraints led the company to abandon its just-in-time business strategy ($) and maintain a larger inventory near its European markets, so that customers were not turned off by long lead times. This caused a significant amount of capital to be tied up in inventory just as demand began to decline, and the company found itself in administration.

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  • If you have $29 million or know a lender irresponsible enough to loan you that amount of money (RIP Credit Suisse), then you might be able to buy Kendall Roy’s apartment. Here is the listing.

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