In the Netherlands it's the AFM. It has been very critical of the quality of the audits it has sampled for several years now. However, Dutch courts have placed

In the Netherlands it's the AFM. It has been very critical of the quality of the audits it has sampled for several years now. However, Dutch courts have placed the onus of proof in establishing that the auditing system at the big-4 is defective in the hands of the supervisor. That's hard to establish via samples. External accounting has a basic function in society. But when the auditee foots the bill and is also the one to provide information on his / her own (possibly faulty) procedures it's not hard to imagine things going wrong. Currently the AFM demands higher standards and asks for more budget for oversight in order to be able to look at more cases. Guess who pays for that oversight - the companies already paying an arm and a leg for the audit.