Ernst & Young Global Limited

Ernst & Young traces its origins to four separate accounting practices founded in the nineteenth century. Harding & Pullein was established in England in 1849. Arthur Young & Company was founded in Chicago in 1906 by Arthur Young, a Scottish immigrant. Ernst & Ernst was founded in Cleveland in 1903 by brothers Alwin and Theodore Ernst. Whinney, Smith and Whinney was established in London in 1894. None of the founders could have imagined that their small practices would eventually merge into a single firm employing 400,000 people.

Ernst & Whinney — itself the product of multiple earlier mergers — merged with Arthur Young in 1989, creating Ernst & Young. The merger was the largest in accounting history at the time, creating a firm with revenues of $4.3 billion and operations in over 100 countries. The new firm adopted the name Ernst & Young and the tagline "Quality In Everything We Do" — a slogan that would later attract considerable irony given subsequent audit failures.

Ernst & Young audited several companies involved in the wave of accounting scandals that followed Enron's collapse, including HealthSouth, where CEO Richard Scrushy orchestrated a $2.7 billion accounting fraud while EY signed off on the accounts. EY paid $109 million to settle SEC charges related to its HealthSouth audits. The settlement, like many Big Four regulatory resolutions, required no admission of wrongdoing.

In 2022, EY announced "Project Everest" — a plan to split the firm into two separate entities: an audit firm and a consulting firm. The rationale was that combining audit and consulting in one firm created conflicts of interest and that the consulting business was undervalued inside the partnership structure. After 18 months of planning and hundreds of millions in preparation costs, EY's U.S. partners voted against the split in April 2023. The firm that had nearly become two remained one.

EY audited Wirecard, the German payments company, for ten years while the company was conducting a €1.9 billion fraud — booking money in bank accounts that did not exist. German regulators found that EY had failed to properly verify the existence of cash balances that represented a quarter of Wirecard's claimed assets. Wirecard collapsed in June 2020. EY faced lawsuits from investors seeking billions in damages. The scandal prompted the European Union to reform audit regulation across the bloc.