The Big Four

Exploration Essay

The big four is a nickname used for the four biggest accounting firms in America in terms of revenue. The firms are Deloitte (headquarter in New York), Ernst & Young (EY) (headquarter in London), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Headquarter in London), and Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG) (headquarter in the Netherlands). These companies audit the vast majority of financial statements from the companies in the S&P 500. Originally, They used to be called the big eight however, in 1989, after many mergers and acquisitions, these four were the remaining firms. The big four work for the biggest companies in the world, in fact, most of the Fortune 500 companies have their financial statements audited from one of the firms. Some of these clients include Apple, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathway. Overall, they employ over one million employees with an average of 250k per firm. These giants together earned over 160 billion dollars at the end of 2021.

One criticism they often get is the amount of research they do before accepting the firm as their customer. Despite all of their resources, usually very research is done and few questions are asked to the company they will be working with. This can later lead to the money they are working with being a fraud or scam money from the firm. The largest and most value out of these four is PwC with a revenue of 35.4 billion dollars every year.