Ben Chu: Accounting for failure

Outlook Physicians get told to heal themselves. And some insolvency accountants could, apparently, benefit from their own medicine too.

RSM Tenon, one of the UK's largest insolvency specialists, itself went into administration yesterday. This was no great shock. RSM Tenon got into serious trouble last year when it was forced to reveal that it had messed up its own accounts – not exactly a great advert for an accountant. A fall in corporate and personal financial failures had also made life tough.

But of course that leaves us with the irony, pointed out by a colleague, that if more firms had gone bust in the slump RSM might not have. One would need a heart of stone not to smile.