Accountants
Until recently accountants have been allowed to artificially reduce the cost of pension scheme accounts with cross subsidies from other areas. This is now not allowed and schemes have been seeing sharply increased costs.
On top of this, some of the larger firms are using scheme accounts to train new trainees which can compromise the quality of the audit.
Rather than keeping the status quo, Trustees should be looking to review their audit arrangements. There are a number of smaller firms that have dedicated pensions audit departments that can complete the audit quickly and effectively at a much lower cost. In particular smaller local firms may be in a much better position to provide this service at a very reasonable price.
There is no reason for the Trustees to be use the same auditors as the sponsoring employer and there can be some very good reasons for using alternative.
My View
The role of Investment consultants can broadly be split into to areas - investment strategy and manager selection. In general manager selection naturally follows on from the strategy that is set by the trustees.
With detailed analysis of recommendations and subsequent monitoring of the strategy Trustees will a better chance of being sold unnecessarily complex and expensive investment solutions.