My experience with Blick Rothenberg

I just wanted to put up a short note that talked a little about my experience with Blick Rothenberg, the London accountancy firm.

They acted on behalf of my company, Jericho Writers Ltd, from 2019-2022. Our partner there charged £400 + VAT per hour. The firm is one of the largest accountancy practices in the UK. It had to be a kosher outfit, right?

Well – you decide. In April of 2020, we hired a new bookkeeper. He was well-qualified and seemed smart … but not much time had gone by before my CEO and I realised we lacked confidence in the numbers being generated. So we asked Blick Rothenberg for help. Specifically we told them that we lacked “confidence” in the data and asked them for “proper scrutiny”.

Which makes sense, right? You want accountancy help. You ask an accountant. We didn’t think we were being dumb.

(Oh, and if you want all this story in video form, then go watch “Blick Rothenberg – The Truth“. That’s me, telling it like it is.)

And – good news, bad news.

Good news: Blick Rothenberg made some technical corrections to the numbers. They worked closely with our bookkeeper. They said he was intelligent, focused and hard-working – their words.

The bad news? Well, it turned out that a massive amount of money had been stolen. (Not by Blicks; I can’t reveal the identity of the perpetrator because there’s a criminal investigation underway.) In some of the months where Blick Rothenberg had supposedly been scrutinising the data, well over 20% of the company’s revenues had been stolen. Because Blicks told us everything was fine, we didn’t investigate further and the perpetrator stole a further huge sum from us – a huge six figure amount.

When all this came to light, we told Blicks. They messed up and messed up badly. They’d want to put things right, no?

Well, it turned out that, no, they had no intention whatsoever of helping. They told us that they’d done nothing wrong, and offered us precisely £0.00 by way of financial compensation.

We said, OK, well, could we maybe resolve the dispute via arbitration, a far quicker and cheaper alternative to court? They said no, without really giving a meaningful reason. Since it would cost £125,000 to launch a lawsuit, and since we’d need about the same again to pay the other side’s costs, and since we don’t have that kind of money because some idiot stole it, that leaves us with no recourse at all.

Except to write posts like this, and make videos like the one above, and hope that public exposure / pressure tells in the end. Go watch that video and make my day. Thanks for reading.