This site has been made possible by Daniel Lai and Vikram Maholtra, two dedicated students of the BAS 4AO course. This assignment required that we first choose an accounting related topic and then put together sufficient amounts of information for a visual presentation in a web page format. As the title makes apparent, we will be focusing on accounting firms. Much attention will be laid upon the history of the Big Five firms, this was deemed to be adequate by our teacher. Services provided by these concerns will only be touched upon briefly, also some facts about the companies will be given for comparison purposes. Hope you can learn something from this visit, and remember to have fun!

An accounting firm is comprised of different types of people ranging from consulting experts, to those specializing in taxes. They offer their services to anyone, if they are a small firm with only a few partners. But this site will only be concentrating on the five largest firms, because they better illustrate how essential accounting is to the most powerful and influential companies of the world. Since the global economy is dependent upon these concerns, this has a direct link to our lives.

The organizational structure of accounting firms differs slightly from traditional corporate hierarchies. It has a panel of senior partners who get final say on decisions rather than a board of directors. These individuals are usually the majority shareholders (being promoted to the level of partner guarantees ownership of stock). Persons such as a CEO and Chairman are still selected however from the group of executives, because using a collective group of people to run the company would be inefficient and time consuming.

You may be wondering what purpose these companies serve in our society. Well, just think of all the mega enterprises dominating the different industries of the market like Microsoft, Nortel, Pfizer, etc. These are corporations which have thousands of transactions weekly, and quite understandably run into troubling issues on a daily basis. This is where the different firms would step in to alleviate these dilemmas by finding an applicable solution to each difficulty. So primarily they act as problem solvers, and along the way also organize all the clutter.

Other notable services include financial statement assurance, auditing, business consulting, business risk consulting and assurance, global corporate finance, processing solutions, and tax work.

Naturally the next question would be, what qualifications do these accountants possess to ensure their competence is adequate, and their abilities are reliable. There are three answers, all of which are acceptable. Designations usually differ in respects to the areas of specialty. CGAs, CMAs, and CAs can all be found contributing a great deal to the accounting firms. All playing an important role to simplify our very intricate business world.

In order for you the reader, to grasp how enormous these big five firms are, a little comparison will be done. The revenues of PricewaterhouseCoopers alone, is more than Corel, Rolex, and Charles Schwab combined. There is some serious money being earned in the accounting field, maybe this will entice you to do some further research into this exciting occupation.

The 5 are: Ernst & Young, Arthur Andersen, Deloitte & Touche, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. To appreciate how far these companies have come, their rich history of triumphing over adversities and succeeding with great diligence will be individually presented. ENJOY!

Copyright 1999

Daniel and Vikram