"The regulators were far too aggressive in dealing with Andersen. They should have dealt with the people responsible for the Enron debacle and not with the firm as a whole. In this way, they put the firm out of business." He also points out that, with 97 per cent of all public companies audited by the Big Four, the loss of Andersen was hardly helpful "I wish there were five We were very sorry that Andersen collapsed. He writes: "[One] risk to the profession's sustainability is the potential for catastrophic losses stemming from outsize lawsuits, which are increasingly numerous. And as processing-power and memory prices fall, they could start to take on the role of personal video recorders as well as storing business information such as email. "When we first came out with the Windows Mobile system, average revenue per user went up: it brings more revenue to the operators."Adding features such as WiFi-based networking to high-end phones increases their usefulness both as a media player and as a business device, and models with WiFi were a common sight at Cannes.

ARM estimates that 20 per cent of phones using its chip designs will be smart phones, 40 per cent "feature" phones, typically with a camera function, and 40 per cent pure voice. The Bill is also likely to include a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment, for knowingly and recklessly giving an incorrect auditing opinion.In Ernst & Young's latest annual report, the company's global chairman and chief executive, James Turley, identified heightened liabilities as a key concern. In the UK, the industry has tried to persuade the Government to include a cap on liabilities in the upcoming overhaul of company law, the Companies Bill, due to be published next month. A compromise deal has been brokered, but it fell short of a cap. There's been a spike in demand and it's been very hard to respond effectively."Nor is that spike going to ease any time soon.

Jeremy Boadle, national head of assurance and business services at the mid-tier accountants Smith & Williamson, sums it up: "It will be a pretty tight market over the next few years until all the new rules gradually become familiar. This really is the biggest shift of most of our lifetimes, in both approach and work levels."Accountancy, once the safest of all white-collar careers, is also a more risky profession now. Companies need advice on legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which is shaking up corporate governance in the United States, and on the new International Financial Reporting Standards, which means the workload for accountancy firms has surged Yet recruitment has waned. "The profession is trying to deal with all the additional work coming on board while finding sufficient well-qualified people," says David Sproul, the partner in charge of talent at Deloitte "It's definitely a problem. In the aftermath of multi-million-dollar financial scandals such as Enron and WorldCom, one of the big five accounting firms - Andersen - collapsed, a number of accountants quit for less controversial pastures new, and regulators turned their full attention towards the profession.Tough new laws governing the way accountants are regulated and financial reporting is carried out have since been introduced.