You are an audit consultant at a top tier accounting firm that is celebrating another year of fee income growth from one of its most important audit clients, a huge telecommunications business (think Telstra / Vodaphone). The last audit you did for this client had run smoothly from your companys point of view, despite some hiccups on delivery times and quality control, but overall, your accounting firm were happy with the depth of this client relationship and its position to keep their business (future tax and consulting projects to the accounting firm of around $1.6 million).

However, yesterday, the telecommunications client asked for an internal review of your account service to negotiate a revised audit fee for the following three years. This leaves you and your accounting colleagues mystified as to why they want to do this.

The client spoke to you yesterday, requesting a meeting to discuss and have stated that they were generally happy with the relationship but asked that the lead audit partner from your firm be removed from the team and they also want to lower the total audit fee by 15%. This will have a negative impact of $185,000 on the accountants.