‘They’ll charge an arm and a leg, and what they deliver doesn’t help anybody.” Charles O’Neil is trashing the big four auditors in his broad Australian accent. 

“Their scope is mostly historical, and the executors are mostly accountants. For a typical audit firm to go and do an audit on a construction project or a contractor … they don’t know what they’re looking at. It’s pointless.” 

O’Neil, a dispute resolution and project management expert, thinks he can do better. “If you have been on enough construction sites, you can walk on and smell what’s going on in the first couple of hours. It’s not all that hard.” So, at the age of 76, he has joined forces with several friends – also construction experts – to form an investigation squad for hire by governments, investors and banks.

When he left German civil engineering giant Bilfinger in his late sixties in 2011, O’Neil was director of asset management responsible for 60 facilities – from design to construction and management – across eight countries. He played an important behind-the-scenes role on the construction of the London 2012 Olympics, after being brought in by a contractor as part of a three-man team to rescue a crucial scheme – which was running 11 months behind schedule but he is not at liberty to name. 

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