When Auditors Pass and Workers Pay: What the Wilko Collapse Tells Us About a Captured System

When Wilko collapsed in 2023, 12,000 people lost their jobs.
The auditors didn’t. The advisers didn’t. The owners didn’t.

In a single hearing of the UK Parliament’s Business and Trade Committee in November 2023, Professor Atul K. Shah quietly confirmed what many workers already felt in their bones: the system did not fail by accident. It worked exactly as designed – to protect institutions and insiders first, and the public last.

This blog unpacks what happened in that hearing – and what it means for Get SAFE, Planning My Life, and the wider movement for structural reform.

1. The Short Version: What Professor Shah Told Parliament

Professor Atul K. Shah, a professor of accounting and finance and member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, was called as an expert witness on the Wilko collapse.

His core message was brutally simple:

“What went wrong is basically the auditors didn’t do their job.”

Key points he raised:

PwC were Wilko’s auditors up to 2019.
EY took over from 2019 onwards.
Wilko’s turnover was high, but margins were thin and falling. Losses were clear and growing – a £56m loss in 2018 alone.
Yet both firms repeatedly signed off the accounts as giving a “true and fair view” and treated the company as a “going concern”, while inserting insurance phrases about “material uncertainty” and future risk.

In other words:
On paper, Wilko both passed and failed the key test – at the same time.

2. The Ticking Clock: Delay, Asset Sales, and a Paper-Going-Concern

One of the most shocking details in Shah’s evidence is timing.

Normally, a UK audit is signed off within 3 months of year-end.
For Wilko’s 2022 accounts, EY took 9 months – the very last allowed deadline.
The day before EY signed the audit report, Wilko sold its Worksop distribution centre (the HQ and core asset) for £50m.
That one-off cash injection was enough to claim the company could keep going – for now.

From the outside, this looks less like neutral auditing and more like engineering a just-in-time fig leaf:

Barclays reportedly wanted a £25m working capital loan repaid.
Cash was short.
Selling a key property plugged the hole.
The auditors then took “comfort” from this short-term fix and allowed a going-concern basis.

Shah’s view was clear:

The business was limping.
The accounts and audit language did not give the public, workers, creditors or pension trustees a straightforward warning.
The ambiguity protected the audit firms – not the people at risk.

3. Conflicted from Every Angle: When the Same Firms Audit, Advise and Liquidate

Shah also highlighted a structural conflict that goes far beyond Wilko:

PwC started as auditors.
After resigning, they returned as consultants, helping with restructuring.
Then they turned up again as insolvency practitioners – getting paid to oversee the aftermath of the collapse, with a reported unpaid £500k bill in play.

The same global firms:

Audit the books
Advise on restructuring
Handle the insolvency
May also have relationships with lenders, buyers, and other counterparties

It’s a web of roles that would be unthinkable in a system truly designed for public-first accountability.

Audit experts like Prem Sikka have long warned that the UK audit market is dominated by a handful of firms, riddled with conflicts of interest, and repeatedly implicated in scandals where workers, pensioners and taxpayers pick up the bill.

Wilko is not an exception. It’s another chapter in an already long book.

4. “Corporate Capture”: When Democracy Bends Around Big Business

Perhaps the most politically charged statement from Shah was this:

We live in a “corporately captured economy” where big business has huge power and influence over elections and policymaking.

He linked this directly to:

The failure to implement serious audit reform, despite Parliament’s own “Future of Audit” report in 2019
The absence of meaningful change in the King’s Speech
The dominance of the Big Four in audit, consultancy, tax, restructuring and insolvency

His argument is blunt:

You cannot have a healthy democracy if key gatekeepers – auditors, large corporations, global consulting firms – are structurally insulated from meaningful accountability.
Net Zero, he suggests, shouldn’t just be about carbon – it should be about Net Zero tolerance for multinational arrogance and abuse of power.

For Get SAFE and AoLP, this language is vital: it reframes failures like Wilko not as isolated tragedies, but as symptoms of a system engineered to favour concentration of power.

5. The Family Business That Stopped Behaving Like a Family

Wilko was a long-standing family business. Workers often described it as a “second family”. Union officer Nadine Houghton told MPs about periods of:

Good pay and conditions
Respect and autonomy in managing stores
A genuine sense of shared endeavour

But that changed.

Shah’s analysis shows a key shift in the ownership structure around 2017:

Up to 2017: the family were recorded as majority owners of the group.
After 2017: a new entity, Amalgamated Holdings, became the majority owner.

This layering allowed the family to distance themselves legally from the operating company, limiting liability just as risks were rising.

Shah’s interpretation:

The owners could see trouble coming.
Their reaction was to shield themselves – not the workers, not the creditors, not the pensioners.

Not every family business behaves like this. But Wilko shows how “family” language can coexist with sophisticated legal and financial strategies designed to ringfence wealth while risk pours downwards onto staff and suppliers.

6. The Real Victims: 12,000 Workers, Small Creditors, and Local Communities

The numbers are stark:

Over 400 stores gone.
Around 12,000 jobs lost.

Many of those workers:

Had decades of service.
Built their lives around the idea that Wilko was “safe” and “solid”.
Had no reasonable way to decode a 60-page annual report or detect nuanced going-concern wording in the audit note.

Yet the system still pretends that:

“The information was public.”
“Markets had the data.”
“No one could have known.”

Someone did know.

The board knew.
The auditors knew far more than the public accounts alone could show.
The lenders knew enough to start recalling facilities.

The people who didn’t know – workers, small suppliers, communities – are the ones who paid.

7. What Wilko Teaches Us About Structural Untrustworthiness Discount (SUD)

From an AoLP / Get SAFE lens, Wilko is a textbook SUD case:

Information Asymmetry
Those with power held superior knowledge and used complex language and timing to manage their own risk.
Conflicted Gatekeepers
Audit firms with multiple roles (auditors, consultants, insolvency practitioners) cannot credibly claim pure independence.
Weak Public Accountability
Parliament can hold hearings, issue reports, and make recommendations – but without implementation, the architecture stays the same.
Downward Risk Transfer
When collapse comes, it’s workers, pensioners, small creditors and local economies who absorb the shock.

This is the same pattern you see in:

Pension mis-selling
QROPS scandals
Motor finance redress battles
HBOS, RBS, Carillion and beyond

Different sector, same design.

8. Where AoLP and Get SAFE Come In

If the system is structurally untrustworthy, we need structurally trustworthy counterweights.

8.1 For Citizens and Workers – Get SAFE

Get SAFE exists to:

Help victims and witnesses of financial harm understand that they are not mad, they are not alone – the system really is stacked against them.
Use independent AI tools to read complex documents – audit reports, board minutes, loan agreements – and surface patterns that would otherwise stay hidden.
Train citizen investigators to build their own dossiers: timelines, document cross-checks, conflicts-of-interest maps, and evidence bundles that stand up to scrutiny.

Wilko shows that we cannot rely on internal gatekeepers alone.
We need external, citizen-led scrutiny – amplified by AI, grounded in ethics.

8.2 For Planners – Academy of Life Planning

AoLP and Planning My Life are about reversing the flow of power:

From institution-led to client-led
From product sales to human capital and structural trust
From blind trust in “big names” (Big Four, large insurers, global banks) to informed discernment

Holistic Wealth Planners and Financial Life Coaches must be able to:

Read an annual report or an audit note and ask: “Who is this really protecting?”
Recognise early-warning signals – not only in individual financial plans, but in the employers, pension schemes, investment platforms and counterparties clients rely on.
Help clients plan for resilience – not just returns.

9. Lessons for Our Movement

Wilko is not just a case study. It’s a warning.

If we don’t change the architecture, the pattern will repeat.

Key takeaways for AoLP / Get SAFE:

Audit reform is not a technical side-issue – it is central to justice and financial wellbeing.
Corporate capture is not a slogan; it’s a lived reality for workers whose futures depend on gatekeepers who do not truly serve them.
Family branding and “we’re all one team” language mean nothing if ownership structures and insolvency strategies are drafted to shield capital while offloading harm.
Independent, citizen-led, AI-supported scrutiny is now a survival skill, not a luxury.

10. Where We Go From Here

If you:

Worked at Wilko or a similar employer and feel something didn’t add up…
Are a victim of financial harm and feel blocked by institutions, legal processes or regulators…
Are a planner who wants to operate outside structurally conflicted models and build a trustworthy practice…

Then Wilko is not just “their story”. It’s a mirror.

At AoLP and Get SAFE, we’re building:

Training, tools and templates to help people investigate, document and challenge structural injustice.
A community of Holistic Wealth Planners and citizen investigators who refuse to accept “that’s just how it is” as an answer.
A movement that treats audit, governance and justice as part of real financial planning, not a separate world for experts only.

If this resonates, reach out.

To explore citizen-investigator tools and support after financial exploitation, connect with Get SAFE.
To learn how to become a structurally trustworthy Holistic Wealth Planner, explore the Academy of Life Planning and Planning My Life pathways.

Wilko shows what happens when power is left unchecked.
Our work is about ensuring that next time, ordinary people aren’t the last to know – and the first to lose.

Ready to explore a fairer, more human way to plan your life and money?

If you’ve been offloaded by your adviser, feel unsure about the value you’ve received, or simply want a planning approach built on purpose, transparency, and empowerment — we’re here to help.

The Academy of Life Planning supports individuals and families through

self-directed planning (PML),
guided expert support (FLC), and
a global network of Holistic Wealth Planners who put your life before your money.

Contact the Academy of Life Planning to find out which approach is right for you.
Let’s rebuild your financial confidence — on your terms.

Get SAFE: A Fellowship for Those Walking Through Fire

Get SAFE is becoming what people are desperately searching for —
a structured, ethical, trauma-informed community for:

victims of financial exploitation
whistleblowers
bereaved families
citizen investigators
advocates and moral leaders

The Fellowship is simple but profound:

We gather to recover agency, share truth, deepen courage, and support one another in the long path from harm to justice.

We are not aligned with any regulator, political system, or institution.
Our strength is our independence.

People came alive when they heard it:

“A Fellowship of truth, justice, and recovery — not a bureaucracy.”
“A place where victims are finally believed.”
“A community rooted in courage, not compliance.”

And because of the AI frameworks we’ve introduced, this Fellowship is not just emotional support — it is practical empowerment.

For the first time, ordinary people can:

build digital dossiers
reconstruct timelines
detect patterns of institutional misconduct
write letters with authority
expose evidence regulators overlooked
collaborate safely across cases
turn pain into purpose

This is how movements begin.

Planning My Life: Preventing Exploitation Before It Starts

What the event also confirmed is this:

People fall into financial exploitation when they fall out of sovereignty.

Planning My Life sits exactly at this junction.

It teaches people:

how to think independently
how to plan their lives before planning their money
how to identify institutional risk
how to spot predatory sales patterns
how to avoid product-led advice
how to stay structurally trustworthy
how to build a life where no adviser can mislead, confuse, or coerce them

Prevention and recovery are two halves of the same circle.

Get SAFE rescues those already harmed.
Planning My Life equips people so it never happens again.

Together, they form a complete empowerment system.

A New Model of Justice Is Emerging — Built by the People Themselves

The collective energy of the event revealed a truth that no institution dares speak:

When regulators fail, citizens take up the role of regulator.
When governance collapses, the governed take up the role of governance.
When truth is buried, truth-tellers become archivists of justice.

The movement we are seeing now is not political.
It is human.

It is built on:

transparency
dignity
courage
integrity
collective intelligence
and the healing power of community

These are the values Paul Moore lived and died for.

This event honoured him not by remembering his warnings —
but by continuing his fight.

Where We Go From Here

The Academy of Life Planning now carries a responsibility that is both moral and strategic:

To give people the tools to understand their lives,

their finances,
and their evidence —
so exploitation no longer survives in the shadows.

Through:

Planning My Life (self-sovereignty)
Get SAFE (justice and recovery)
AI-as-co-pilot (pattern recognition, empowerment, clarity)
The Fellowship (community and courage)
The GAME Plan (a universal cycle of intention-to-manifestation)

…we are building the world that institutions promised but failed to deliver.

A world where truth has a home.
A world where victims are lifted, not shunned.
A world where ordinary people can finally stand equal to the powers that harmed them.
A world where transparency is not a slogan —
it is a lived practice that restores dignity, agency, and hope.

This is the movement Paul Moore began.
This is the movement that rose in that meeting.
This is the movement we now carry forward.

And we will not stop until every victim finds their voice,
every truth comes to light,
and every life stolen by exploitation is honoured through justice.

In One Sentence

Goliathon turns victims of financial exploitation into confident, capable citizen investigators who can build professional-grade cases using structured training, emotional support, and independent AI.

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Purchase today for £2.99 and get your secure link to:

the training video, and
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Link to Goliathon Taster £2.99.

If the session resonates, you can upgrade to the full Goliathon Programme for £29 and continue your journey toward clarity, justice, and recovery.

Every year, thousands across the UK lose their savings, pensions, and peace of mind to corporate financial exploitation — and are left to face the aftermath alone.

Get SAFE (Support After Financial Exploitation) exists to change that.
We’re creating a national lifeline for victims — offering free emotional recovery, life-planning, and justice support through our Fellowship, Witnessing Service, and Citizen Investigator training.

We’re now raising £20,000 to:
Register Get SAFE as a Charity (CIO)
Build our website, CRM, and outreach platform
Fund our first year of free support and recovery programmes

Every £50 donation provides a bursary for one survivor — giving access to the tools, training, and community needed to rebuild life and pursue justice with confidence.

Your contribution doesn’t just fund a project — it fuels a movement.
Support the Crowdfunder today and help us rebuild lives and restore justice.

Join us at: http://www.aolp.info/getsafe
steve.conley@aolp.co.uk | +44 (0)7850 102070