Essay Example on the State of Big Four Auditors

Employment can be defined as a relationship among two parties where one party might be a co-operative, a corporation, non-profit or for-profit organization or any other entity that is an employer and the other party is the employee that is usually based on a contract whereby service or work is paid for. Employees or workers offer their services in the aim of a payment return that may be informed of hourly wages, by annual salary or piecework, depending on the work type that an employee does or the sector that he/she is working. In some industries or fields, employees may enjoy stock options, gratuities or bonus payments while in some employment types, employees may enjoy benefits on to of their salaries such benefits may include disability insurance, health insurance, use of a gym or even housing. This paper will try to analyze the state of three companies that deal with accounting which includes Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), Deloitte and Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG).

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Price Waterhouse Coopers is a multinational professional Services network whose headquarters are located in London, United Kingdom. The symbol of the company is PWC and is ranked among the largest professional services firms globally after Deloitte and falls among the Big Four auditors along with KPMG, Deloitte and EY. PWC is located in one hundred and fifty-eight countries in the world and has seven hundred and twenty-one locations within these countries having employed over two hundred and fifty thousand employees globally. By 2015, 32% of the workforce came from Western Europe, 22% were from Asia, and 26% came from the Caribbean and North America. In the 2017 financial year, the global revenues of the company were $37.7 billion of which $16 billion came from its assurance practice, $12.25 billion came from its advisory practice and the rest $9.46 billion came from its tax practice (Chiu et al. 931). Out of the Fortune 500 companies, PWC provides services to 420 of them.

PWC was formed out of a merger between Price Waterhouse and Coopers and Lybrand in 1998. The history of the two companies dated from the 19th century. Price Waterhouse Coopers shortened its trading name in 2010 to PWC as a way of rebranding. The company remained the 5th largest company that is privately owned company in the United States as of 2017. The first accountancy practice was founded by William Cooper in 1854 in London which seven years later became Cooper Brothers after three of his brothers joined. In 1898, Edward Ross, Robert Montgomery, Adam Ross and William Lybrand joined to form Lybrand, Ross Brothers and Montgomery company in the United States. In 1957 the two companies, Currie and Co and another Canadian firm McDonald decided to adopt the name Coopers and Lybrand in the international practice. Later the three-member firms chose to change their names to Coopers and Lybrand in 1973.

In 1849, an accountant named Samuel Lowell Price founded an accountancy practice in London. Price joined a partnership deal with Edwin Waterhouse and William Hopkins Holyland who later left leaving the two individuals who named their firm Price, Waterhouse and Co from 1874. From then the company grew and expanded its accounting services to the United States and the United Kingdom and worldwide in 1998 Coopers and Lybrand and Price Waterhouse merged to form PricewaterhouseCoopers. After the merge, the firm had a large number of professional consulting branches across the globe, and it generated many fees that led to its fast growth. PWC was formed in a period where there were increased conflicts of interests and was under high pressure of avoiding such conflicts by not offering some consultancy services specifically financial system implementation and design to its audit clients.

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited that is commonly known as Deloitte is a multinational professional service network that is among the Big Four accounting organizations as well as the most extensive professional services network in the world by some professionals and revenue. The company or firm offers financial advisory, audit, expertise risk, tax and consulting services with over two hundred and eighty-six thousand professional employees across the globe. In the 2018 fiscal year, Deloitte earned a record of $43.2 billion in aggregate revenues (Boone et al. 3). It was ranked to be the 4th largest privately-owned consultancy company in the United States as of 2017. In 2015, Deloitte company was considered to be having the largest market share in consultancy and auditing amongst the top 500 companies located in India, and as of 2012, in the United Kingdom, it had the most significant number of clients among all the FTSE 250 companies. Deloitte has been ranked four consecutive times to be number one in both management consulting and global consulting basing on its aggregate revenue by Kennedy Consulting Research and Advisory and ranked number one by Gartner in market share in consultancy.

Deloitte and Touche were formed in 1989 after a merge between Touche Ross and Deloitte Haskins and Sell in the United States. Deloitte and Touche partners decided to create a group known as Deloitte and Touche consulting in 1995 which is today known as Deloitte Consulting. Deloitte later in 2000, acquired Eclipse which enabled it to add internet design-based solutions in an aim to expand its consultancy capabilities and afterwards the Eclipse was split into Deloitte Digital and Deloitte Online.

Works Cited

Boone, Jeff P., Inder K. Khurana, and K. K. Raman. "Spatial Competition in Local Audit Markets and the Fallout on Deloitte from the 2007 PCAOB Censure." Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory 36.2 (2016): 1-19. Retrieved from https://www.aaajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2308/ajpt-51571

Chiu, She-Chih, Chin-Chen Chien, and Hsuan-Chu Lin. "Audit quality following the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's operation." Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society 17.5 (2017): 927-946. Retrieved from https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/CG-02-2017-0026