In 2024, the Audit Reform Lab at the University of Sheffield published a finding that should have stopped the profession cold. Auditors had failed to warn of possible bankruptcy in roughly 75 per cent of the largest 250 listed UK companies that collapsed between 2010 and 2022. Every one of those companies had received a clean opinion. Every one had thick files, signed engagement letters, and the branding of a reputable firm behind it. Productivity theatre at work, in its most consequential professional form, had been operating for over a decade in plain view of the regulators.
Audit failures and incentives in the UK
The Financial Reporting Council’s 2024/25 enforcement review confirmed the pattern was ongoing. It imposed £14.1 million in sanctions on audit firms for deficient work, citing repeated weaknesses in professional scepticism. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland’s 2024 monitoring visits found that only 52 per cent of audit files reviewed were fully compliant with standards. The rest showed breaches ranging from inadequate testing to failure to challenge management assumptions.
These are not obscure technical failings. They describe a professional services environment in which the visible deliverables of competence (the signed opinion, the documented procedure, the compliance checklist) were produced and billed for, while the substantive work those deliverables were supposed to represent – asking whether the numbers were real, whether the business was solvent, whether the client’s story held together – was routinely not done to the standard the profession’s own rules required.
The incentives explain why. An audit firm’s revenue depends on retaining the client. A partner who raises uncomfortable findings risks the relationship. A team that takes longer to resolve a difficult question costs more to deploy than a team that reaches a clean conclusion quickly. Billable hours incentives reward visible time on the clock, and in the audit context, that means time spent producing compliant-looking documentation. Time spent arguing with a client about whether their revenue recognition policy is defensible is harder to bill, harder to justify internally, and commercially riskier than time spent completing the file.
The dynamic extends well beyond audit. In management consulting, the deliverable is often a deck. The deck is polished, branded, and presented with confidence. Whether the recommendation inside it was tested against the client’s actual operating conditions, or whether it was assembled from a template library and adapted to fit the brief, is a question the fee model does not ask. The consultant is evaluated on utilisation rate and client satisfaction scores. Neither of these measures whether the advice was right. They measure whether the consultant looked busy and whether the client felt looked after. A senior associate at a law firm faces a version of the same arithmetic. The hours logged are visible. The quality of the judgment applied during those hours is assessed, if at all, only when something goes wrong, often years later.
How performative work in offices becomes the default
The professional who operates inside these incentives is not making a moral choice. They are making a rational one. The system around them has made the display of competence cheaper to produce and safer to deliver than the exercise of competence in its uncomfortable, client-challenging, relationship-risking form.
This is the condition that emerges in any professional environment where the metric used to evaluate performance tracks activity rather than outcome, where producing the metric costs less than producing what it was designed to represent, and where hitting the number pays off faster and more reliably than delivering the result the number was supposed to measure.
When those conditions are present, the rational professional performs. Rathe than in the sense of doing the work badly, performance is more in the sense of doing the work the system actually rewards. The file gets completed and the deck gets delivered, while the hours get logged and the opinion gets signed. Each of these is real work. Each required skill, time and effort. The question of whether any of it answered the question the client was paying to have answered sits in a different part of the incentive model, the part where the consequences are slower, less visible, and easier for someone else to absorb.
The professional who quietly suspects this about their own working environment is usually right. The meeting that exists to produce the appearance of alignment rather than the fact of it. The quarterly review that evaluates how well the work was presented rather than what it produced. Each is the same dynamic operating at the scale of ordinary office life rather than at the scale of a corporate collapse. The cost is smaller. The logic is identical.
The profession that audited 75 per cent of the UK’s largest collapses without raising an alarm knew exactly how to do the work. It had been shown, through a decade of fees and renewals and utilisation targets, that the work was something else. The work was the file. The question the file was supposed to answer had become someone else’s problem. It became the investors’, the employees’, the pension holders’, and in the end, the regulators’. The people who produced the display kept their contracts. The people who relied on it paid the bill. When looking competent pays better than being competent, every rational person in the building starts performing.