As well as thinking twice before booking posh restaurants and upgrading airfares, Tim Burr will see through reforms of the National Audit Office, including a tightening of its corporate governance procedures. But he is likely to face calls from within Whitehall to go further.

The NAO has a great reputation for drawing attention to waste and extravagance within government. However its reputation for sharing best practice is less good.

And in that sense its more regional equivalent, the Audit Commission, enjoys a much better reputation. The commission (under the stewardship of Steve Bundred; it's too early to say whether he might make a worthy successor to Sir John) may have a less toothy reputation than the NAO, but when it comes to disseminating best practice in efficient public service delivery, it has few equals.

(Apropos of very little, I did enjoy the journalists in newspapers today who sought to gently bury Sir John while simultaneously admitting to enjoying lunch at the taxpayers' expense. In fairness at an average of £154 a time, they must have been good lunches).

For someone who had never sought the public eye this would have been extremely embarassing. Sir John had worked in some of Whitehall's more sensitive departments and so for a long time you would never see have seen a picture of him appear in any newspaper or magazine. Yet when I interviewed him (many years ago and without a photographer in tow needless to say) he was forthcoming and forthright in equal measure.

Labour MP Austin Mitchell may be a veteran member of the Public Accounts Committee (which works closely with the NAO, of course) but he has never been one to suffer fools gladly. And it's testimony to the high regard in which Sir John is held that he said of the resignation: 'It is a great shame. He is a devoted public servant who has done a splendid job. His departure will be a serious loss to us.'

Mitchell said the lack of suitable corporate governance system meant this was an 'accident' waiting to happen, adding: 'I think it was a cause for criticism but not for resignation, but he is a proud man'.

The 2006/07 review found 31% of NHS trusts and primary care showed 'inadequate performance' – though this was better than last year's 39%. Perhaps the headline improvement was that despite a deficit of £547m in 2005/06, the NHS made a small surplus of £515m in 2006/07.

It was comments from Steve Bundred, chief executive of the Audit Commission and a former local government finance director, that hammered home to me why accountancy does indeed matter.

'A number of NHS bodies are failing to manage their finances adequately and there appears little hope that they can get out of trouble by themselves,' he said.

'Managing money well goes hand-in-hand with providing better patient care. Trusts that fail to manage their money well are unlikely to be doing their best for patients.'

You can apply that to other sectors and other industries.

On 23 October 1987 former champion jockey Lester Piggott was sentenced to three years' imprsionment after being found guilty of an alleged tax fraud that cost the public purse £3m.

He was jailed after failing to declare income to the then Inland Revenue of £3.25m, including an alleged omission of £1.4m from additional riding income and a further £1m from bloodstock operations earned over a 14-year period. He was alleged to have used different names and a network of secret bank accounts from Switzerland to the Bahamas, Singapore and the Cayman Islands to shield parts of his £20m personal fortune.

Sentencing him at Ipswich Crown Court, Mr Justice Farquharson said Pigott had even misled his own accountant.

The case may feel of a different time but comments by Newmarket trainer David Thom on Piggott's jailing sound familiar today. Describing the sentence as a 'terrible injustice', he told the BBC that Piggott had put 'more money in the taxman's coffers than any 100 people could have done'. Avoiding tax because of the volume tax paid elsewhere remains a common argument and one with which Hartnett is likely to find little sympathy.

Ever the contrarian, Newman bemoaned the lack of serious discussion in the wake of the report, save the FT's frosty dismissal of 'glacial progress' and Accountancy Age's coverage. We warned that the UK's conservative approach could result in the US taking the initiative in this area. (Jeremy makes no bones about saying that this dark thought was in fact his own). And he quotes the headline of our lead comment piece: 'Boldness a Dirty Word in Audit Choice Reform'.

Describing himself as 'disappointed' but 'unsurprised' by the report, he says that 'without compromise by key players (and this primarily means the Big Four) a market-led approach is unlikely to result in any significant change'.

He adds: 'The Big Four need to judge which is the biggest danger - the risk of regulatory intervention (possibly prompted by the US) or changing their behaviour towards the non Big Four firms in the hope this will be sufficient to avoid such intervention.

'Those of us who support a market led approach hope that there will be enough changes of behaviour (and this is not just by the Big Four) to make a real difference and thus head off the risk of regulatory (or Government) intervention.'

Now that's not a market-led approach in my book. It's a decision taken by the market to stave off the threat of having that decision-making capability taken away from it in the future. And that's a compromise.

In this regard the Big Four's approach is more pure. They talk of their ambitions to grow their market share. That's a market appraoch.

I think I understand the difficulty here. If a pure market approach isn't going to generate more competition at the top and a regulatory approach isn't going to work either (as Accountancy Age's leader argues) what's left?

Well, it perhaps only leaves agreement by the big six or seven firms to work together to level the playing field in the hope that this prevents a more undesirable regulatory scenario being forced upon them.

And, while that approach may be beneficial for all concerned and very much in the interests of the capital markets, that sounds too much like the behaviour of a cartel.

Best to talk about a market approach then.

Normally journalists don't admit to this sort of thing – we did so because we knew the figures had a finger in the air quality to them. (A post by my colleague Alex Hawkes explains our thinking more on this one).

But it highlighted the degree to which the government has been put on the back foot on tax in the last fortnight. And it responded by, it has to said, following to an agenda very much set by the opposition. From non-doms (tick) to inheritance tax (tick) to private equity (tick), it felt a highly reactive statement. And it was.

'I can't remember such a baldly political pre Budget statement like this one,' said a Radio Five Live correspondent. Nor me.'

In the current climate talking about the audit market may appear somewhat prosaic. The credit crunch has kicked the audit choice debate very much into touch – for now at least. But with the Financial Reporting Council promising its recommendations on injecting more competition and choice into the market due any time now, there are signs that the market is already beginning to shift.

The latest audit fees survey from our sister title Financial Director shows only a comparatively modest increase in FTSE100 audit fees – from an average of £3.7m to £4m. (That's if it's not too much of a stretch to describe an inflation-busting 8% as modest –especially during a year that has seen no regulatory step-change). And it shows a market firmly stitched up by the Big Four.

Drop to the FTSE250, though, and it's a subtly different story.

In that market, audit fees are dropping (15%) as are audit-related fees (taken together the two are down 7% year or year).

BDO Stoy Hayward's Jeremy Newman has, of course, led the mid-tier campaign for competition and choice. And there's some evidence that his campaign is beginning to deliver modest gains.

Albeit from a low base, BDO has grown its audit fees by 21% and its combined audit and audit-related fees by 57%. That said it's down by one client to five, but demanding higher fees from existing clients used to be the preserve of the bigger firms.

Perhaps more significantly Grant Thornton, a much quieter protagonist in this debate, has gained its first two FTSE250 clients, creating a six-firm market. Deloitte and KPMG both gained a client each, with E&Y and PwC in retreat.

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that these figures represent a revolution. But they do indicate a willingness on the part of some of the biggest (second-tier) companies in the

UK

to listen to the mid-tier case. Next year's results will be closely watched – as will the FRC's steps in the interim.