We haven’t had a major accounting scandal for some time,” Paul Boyle says — looking nervously around the room as though waiting for fate to spring a nasty surprise on him.

Nothing happens, so Mr Boyle, the first chief executive of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) and chairman of the International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators, continues: “The quality of earnings has gone up. Accounting standards have reduced the flaky items in the income statement ... It is indicative of finance departments and accountants all taking their jobs much more seriously.

“Audit committee chairmen all tell you that audit committees are all meeting more often, and for longer, and looking at things in much more detail than they did ten years ago.”

Mr Boyle steps down next week. During his 5½-year tenure, the FRC, which sets and enforces accountancy, auditing and actuary standards, has become more active, making strenuous efforts to draw the profession’s attention to good practice. “We prefer that companies put things right rather than us drawing the satisfaction of pointing out what has gone wrong.

“We wrote to 30 companies with large amounts of goodwill and said we would be looking at their impairments — and the vast majority of them improved their accounting practices. They did the right thing rather than us having to lie in wait for them.”

When Mr Boyle joined the FRC, he changed the rationale of its financial reporting review panel. Instead of waiting for complaints about accounts before investigating, it actively looks for problems. “People take it seriously and don’t want to be drawn into conversations with it. We deal with 300 cases a year and that affects [a lot of] other companies.”

Such a proactive approach has reaped rewards. Last autumn, for example, the FRC called in the big audit firms and laid down the law about dealing early and quickly with client companies that looked as if they were going to go bankrupt. It is thought that many disasters were averted as a result.

That is not to say that Mr Boyle has had an easy time with the “Big Four”. He sees four auditors as too few and wants to see more firms compete with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG. If one were to fail, big companies could not secure a suitable alternative, he argues, because the survivors would be busy.

He also thinks that the audit firms are treading a fine line on maintaining their independence while offering both audit and non-audit services to the same clients. This is an area where the Treasury Select Committee has also been making a lot of noise. “The key issue,” Mr Boyle he says, “is who does the auditor really believe his client is? Does the auditor really feel he is acting in the interests of shareholders, or of management? And if it is a bit of both, then how does he reconcile the potential conflict?” He is not convinced that UK plc has struck the right balance.

He has also fought battles with those, mostly other regulators and politicians, who, as the financial crisis deepened, decided that financial reporting should be telling good news and so increasing financial stability, rather than reporting what was actually happening. Head down that slippery slope, he says, and the next thing is that the Government will order that house price statistics should be altered “to prevent these seditious numbers being disclosed to a public who cannot be trusted to react in a way consistent with financial stability”.

When he leaves the council next Monday — to be replaced by Stephen Haddrill, from the Association of British Insurers — he has no idea what he will do next. But he had six months’ gardening leave written into his contract, which means that conflicts of interest can be avoided and, more importantly, for the first time since the recession began, he can kick back and relax.

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