British regulators have been issuing tougher punishments to companies found guilty of wrongdoing, according to an 'investigations index' concocted by the accountancy firm formerly known as Ernst & Young. The average fine issued in the last 24 months has increased from £10.8 million to £42.3 million – a jump of 291%.

The total amount levied in all those fines has similarly increased by 271% over the same period, totalling £2.45 billion. The Index examined a total of 231 cases between 1 October 2013 and 30 September 2015 and was based on data from regulatory bodies such as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) and the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).

British regulators are definitely trying harder to allay financial crime. One EY bigwig wrote in the report: "In the wake of recent corporate scandals and growing political pressure, there seems to be a greater focus by the regulators to pursue cases that may once have been considered ‘too difficult’, to ensure those responsible for wrongdoing are held to account. The top reasons for fines identified in our research, namely systems failings, business misconduct and misleading information, were all factors that could have been avoided by stronger control processes.”

There have been more prison sentences, but miscreants have been spending shorter spells behind bars. The study found that the average prison sentence – issued by a court after one or other of the four regulatory bodies had finished its investigation - has decreased by 40%, from 87 months to 52 months, over the past two years. However, this is still three times longer than the one year and four month average sentence issued in the UK as a whole in 2014. What the EY survey does not say, however, is that British justice happens in an inordinately slow and meandering way, with people on average being imprisoned and/or waiting 13 months if not longer between arrest and trial. Such delays no doubt inspire judges to pass sentences that exceed the amount of time for which the defendants have already been detained in an effort to make the Government's prosecutorial procedures seem vaguely just.

According to EY’s analysis, "the UK’s regulatory bodies are handing out more prison sentences, with the amount of all prison time increasing by 124% in the last two years." It is not known when this revolution in the English penal system is supposed to have happened, nor whether anyone at EY has alerted the Attorney-General to it.

On a less embarrassing note, Sanjay Bhandari, a partner in EY’s UK fraud investigation and dispute services team, wrote in the report: “Historically, the management of owner-operated companies have tended to be more likely to be the subject of individual prosecutions for white-collar crime as they may be less complex cases. However, increasingly, regulators and law enforcement agencies seem to be demonstrating a greater willingness to take on individuals in more complex organisations.”

The researchers also found that 58% of cases investigated by the SFO resulted in prison sentences; 56% of the cases the FCA investigated resulted in fines; 25 out of the 82 cases investigated by the FCA over the course of two years were against humans as opposed to corporations, and 36% of those resulted in prison sentences; 10% of all cases dealt with fraud; and 119 out of the 125 cases investigated by the CMA and OFT in the past two years were due to a proposed or completed merger or acquisition. Readers are advised to take these figures with the same pinch of salt with which they should take EY's assertion that regulators can send people to prison.