We are told, often with great confidence, that capitalism is nothing if not fair. Markets always reward good business ideas, punish dispassionately bad ones. Success, in this story, is always earned. Failure, though harsh, is just an act of cleansing. But then Jaguar Land Rover suffers a cyberattack, production grinds to a halt, suppliers cry out for cash, and suddenly the government is stepping in with billions in guarantees while banks conjure up a £1.5bn credit line.

Jaguar Land Rover secured an additional £2bn debt facility with Citigroup, Mitsubishi UFJ and Standard Chartered, taking its emergency funding to £3.5bn, a deal on which the company declined to comment.”

If that is fairness, it has a very odd sense of humour. The official explanation, of course, is that JLR is systemically important. Let it collapse and you risk job losses, an entire supply chain hollowing out, and a Midlands economy wobbling just before an election. So the state becomes the banker of last resort, the taxpayer an unwilling shareholder.

Let’s contrast this with the fate of a small business, a start-up in Birmingham or a garage in Wolverhampton, where the moment sales falter, the bank quietly reduces the overdraft and the shutters come down. No headlines, no guarantees, just another statistic. So the rationale is simple: the big are protected because their fall would shake the system; the small are left to their fate because their demise is contained. The simplicity of this logic hides the messiness of reality. For a start, it entrenches inequality.

The already powerful enjoy cushions, while those who might genuinely need support are denied it. It also creates a moral hazard. If you know the state will rush in, why bother investing properly in resilience? Why spend heavily on cyber defences if you can assume that public money will cover the losses when disaster strikes?

And here’s the uncomfortable corner where auditing meets politics. The standards say that if management has secured financing for the next twelve months, then the going concern assumption is satisfied. Tick the box, move on.

In JLR’s case, financing was secured, not by its own trading strength, but by government guarantees and banks responding to political nudges. So, here comes the uncomfortable truth. Technically, the auditor can sign off; however, what are they truly signing off?

1. Are they comfortable with the financial resilience of the company, or
2. merely acknowledging the government’s unwillingness to let it die?

This is where the profession likes to retreat to neutrality. “We report the facts,” auditors insist, “we do not comment on politics.” Yet the distinction is thinner than we pretend. If the facts themselves are shaped by politics, then silence becomes complicity. Should a set of accounts not disclose clearly that survival is contingent on the public purse?

Should an audit report not point out, explicitly, that the company continues as a going concern only because taxpayers are underwriting it? Or do we content ourselves with bland language, a line or two buried in the notes, and let the public believe in a resilience that doesn’t exist?

History offers its warnings. In 2008, the banks collapsed under the weight of their own leverage. Governments back then quickly nationalised losses. Auditors nodded along, and the world carried on as if it had been an unavoidable storm rather than a man-made flood. And therefore, in doing so, taught executives not caution, but a dangerous confidence. They had proof now that they were too big to fail. Jaguar Land Rover is not a bank, but the pattern is familiar: dependence on political will dressed up as commercial strength.

For students, the exam material is still relevant. You need to know your audit risk triangle: inherent, control, and detection risks. You need to understand the flavours of audit opinion: unmodified, qualified, adverse, disclaimer. You need to recognise that cyberattacks raise inherent risk, that disabled systems heighten control risk, and that compromised data inflates detection risk. All true, all examinable. But don’t stop there. Ask yourself the questions the textbooks conveniently avoid. What if the real risk is not inherent or control, but reputational, the government’s embarrassment at letting a national icon collapse?

How do you audit embarrassment? Where is that in the standards?

There is also something faintly comic in the way it plays out. Here is Jaguar Land Rover, owned by Tata Motors, itself part of Tata Group, one of India’s most powerful conglomerates.

When crisis comes, it is taxpayers who provide comfort, a spectacle Montaigne might have savoured, for nothing shows the fragility of human arrangements more clearly than the wealthy shielded while the powerless stand exposed.

The consequences are serious.

The small business owner denied credit is told that markets must be disciplined. The multinational, given a guarantee, is told that markets must be protected. Auditors, caught in the middle, nod gravely and attest that the accounts give a “true and fair view.” Yet what view is it? The truth that a company is propped up by politics, or the fiction that it stands on its own?

I’m not suggesting ever slightly, and to say that auditors should become activists. But independence means more than avoiding free dinners with clients. It means telling the truth even when the truth is awkward. If a company’s going concern depends on political will, then that should be obvious to anyone reading the audit report. If disclosures are too vague, they should be challenged. Otherwise, the profession becomes little more than a translator of management spin.

So for students, as future accountants and auditors, you can master the rules, and you must. But you must also learn to notice when the rules are concealing rather than revealing. To see when “going concern” is less a judgement of resilience than a reflection of politics. To ask, quietly but firmly, whether your duty lies in repeating the story as given, or in pointing out its contradictions.

The way I see it, capitalism, in practice, protects its giants and exposes its minnows. And unless someone is willing to say so,  in the notes, in the opinion, in the commentary, that distortion will go unchallenged. It may not be examinable in quite the same way as audit risk or qualified opinions. But it is no less real. And if the profession is to be more than an accessory to power, it must at least have the courage to hint at that reality.