LONDON:Britain’s top accountants will meet with competition regulators next week to discuss limiting the “Big Four” auditors’ market share after lawmakers called for them to be broken up.
Lawmakers have accused EY, KPMG, Deloitte and PwC of being an “oligopoly” that checks the books of nearly all the 350 leading companies in Britain, with smaller rivals barely having a look in.
After the collapse of outsourcer Carillion in January, a parliamentary committee said the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) should consider breaking up the Big Four into more audit firms, and detaching audit arms from consulting services.
Faced with this, accounting industry officials began thrashing out proposals for limiting how many big company audits the Big Four should be allowed to conduct, Reuters reported in June.
