External check · free

Can your auditor sign the accounts that go in the prospectus?

An audit firm must be registered with the FRC to give the audit report on the accounts of a company incorporated outside the UK whose transferable securities are admitted to a UK regulated market — the Main Market. It is a hard condition precedent, it is checkable in one lookup, and it is missed often enough to cost a timetable.

The register carries 126 firms across 46 countries, read on 2026-09-09. There is no bulk download for it, so this is a scrape of the FRC’s own pages, and every answer links back to the page it was read from.

Where is the issuer incorporated?The company whose accounts go in the prospectus — not the operating subsidiaries. This register governs auditors of companies incorporated outside the UK, so it does not apply to a UK issuer.Group auditor — registered legal nameAs the firm is registered, not the network brand.Country of registrationMember firms register separately, and names repeat across jurisdictions.

What this does not tell you

A miss is not an accusation. “No entry matched” is an observation about the register and about the string you gave it — far more often a trading name or a network brand than an unregistered firm. Try the registered legal name before concluding anything.
Country is required, not a refinement. Names repeat across jurisdictions: “KPMG LLP” is five different registered firms in five countries. A name matching in more than one country without a country given is a question back to you, never a verdict.
The result is as current as the date. A register says what it said on the day it was read. Before relying on this, run the FRC’s own search.
Registration is not the whole eligibility question. Independence, rotation, group-audit scope and the reporting accountant’s own appointment are separate matters, and none of them is on this page.

One of three external checks that sit beside the FPPP criteria, not inside them — auditor eligibility is a condition precedent, not a procedures question, and inventing a criterion to house it would break the claim that every criterion traces to a cited ICAEW objective. The others are the sanctions sweep and the perimeter check against GLEIF. All three are free. What is not free is the diagnostic they are reported inside.