Christmas is the season of goodwill. The new year will be the season to write it off. The recession has pricked auditors’ interest and among their top priorities for upcoming annual audits is to probe that intangible asset sitting on company balance sheets, goodwill.

Companies generally use projected future profits to justify goodwill on their balance sheets, which is essentially no more than the difference between the price paid for a business and its book value. Indeed, as most forecasters last October were still predicting economic growth across the developed world, many auditors took Lehman’s collapse as an anomaly and believed normal earnings would resume. As a result, only €71bn of goodwill was written off by Europe’s 600 biggest listed companies, according to investment bank Houlihan Lokey, and almost half of that was due to a single company: Royal Bank of Scotland. This year, given the depth of the recession, the idea that accountants will be as lenient again looks daft.