New figures on accountancy firm fees are likely to provide ammunition for regulators who claim that global firms are focusing on big-ticket work at the expense of reliably independent audits.

In the wake of the WorldCom and Enron scandals, financial services companies have come under pressure from regulators to make their auditing divisions more independent. New research from Manifest, the proxy-voting agency, shows that auditors earn nearly twice as much from the non-audit work that they conduct for top 100 companies in the UK than they generate from traditional audit work. Of the £848m (€1.3bn) that is generated from FTSE 100 firms by UK auditors, £257m comes from audit fees and £591m from non-audit fees.