Deloitte vs KPMG

William Welch Deloitte opened an accounting practice in London in 1845, at a time when the profession of accountancy barely existed as a formal discipline. His early clients included the Great Western Railway — one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in Victorian England. The railways were the first businesses complex enough to require independent financial oversight. In 1849, Deloitte was appointed the first independent auditor of a public company in history.

Deloitte opened its first U.S. office in New York in 1893, following its British clients as they expanded into American markets. The U.S. would eventually become the firm's largest market. The transatlantic expansion established a template that the major accounting firms would follow for the next century: grow internationally by following clients, not by seeking new ones.

Deloitte Haskins & Sells merged with Touche Ross in 1989, creating Deloitte & Touche — one of the largest accounting mergers in history. The combined firm had over 60,000 employees in 100 countries. The merger was driven by the need to serve multinational clients who required consistent audit standards across borders. This consolidation dynamic would eventually reduce the global audit market to just four dominant firms.

When Arthur Andersen collapsed in 2002 following the Enron scandal, Deloitte was the only Big Five firm that did not aggressively acquire Andersen's practice. While KPMG, Ernst & Young, and Pwcabsorbed thousands of Andersen partners and clients, Deloitte grew more selectively. The restraint proved wise: the firms that grew fastest from Andersen's collapse also inherited the most regulatory scrutiny.

Deloitte reported revenues of approximately $64 billion in fiscal year 2023, making it the world's largest professional services firm — a position it retained for years afterward, ranked No. 1 by revenue by Gartner for the eighth consecutive year in 2025. The firm employed over 450,000 people across 150 countries. However, the consulting industry faced headwinds in 2024-2025: Deloitte cut advisory roles in the UK as large-scale project demand softened, and reduced U.S. government consulting headcount as federal contracts were restructured under the DOGE efficiency initiative. AI was simultaneously threatening to automate the analytical work that had made consulting firms valuable — and creating enormous new demand for AI strategy and implementation work. Deloitte was racing to position itself on both sides of that disruption.

KPMG's oldest predecessor traces its origins to an Amsterdam trading house founded in 1818. The K in KPMG stands for Piet Klijnveld (Amsterdam, 1917); the P for William Barclay Peat (London, 1870); the M for James Marwick (New York, 1897); the G for Reinhard Goerdeler (Germany). It took until 1987 for all four national traditions to unite under a single name that nobody could fully explain.

KPMG was created in 1987 through the merger of Peat Marwick International and KMG (Klijnveld Main Goerdeler). The combined name was chosen because neither side would accept the other's name as primary. Partners from the two legacy firms reportedly maintained their separate cultures and rivalries for years after the official merger. The name itself — four initials representing four men from four countries across two centuries — became the most complex origin story in professional services.

In 2005, KPMG admitted to criminal wrongdoing in connection with fraudulent tax shelters that had helped wealthy clients evade approximately $2.5 billion in taxes. KPMG paid $456 million in fines — the largest criminal tax case in U.S. history at the time — and agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement. The Department of Justice chose not to indict the firm itself, reasoning that doing so would likely destroy it and harm innocent employees and clients, as had happened with Arthur Andersen three years earlier. The "too big to indict" logic that would later apply to major banks was applied here first.

KPMG South Africa became entangled in the "state capture" scandal surrounding the Gupta family's alleged corrupt influence over the South African government during the Zuma administration. KPMG had audited Gupta-linked entities and produced a report used to justify the firing of the country's finance minister. KPMG later withdrew the report, acknowledging it should never have been issued. Seven senior KPMG South Africa partners resigned. The South African Revenue Service terminated its relationship with KPMG.

KPMG audited Silicon Valley Bank and issued a clean audit opinion just two weeks before SVB collapsed in March 2023 — the second largest bank failure in U.S. history at the time. KPMG had signed off on SVB's financial statements without flagging the bank's extreme vulnerability to rising interest rates, which had rendered its bond portfolio deeply underwater. Congressional investigators and regulators began examining whether KPMG's audit had missed warning signs that should have been visible to a competent auditor. The SVB episode followed the tax shelter scandal and the South Africa state capture debacle to make KPMG's recent history a catalogue of audit failures across three continents and two decades.