KPMG International Limited

KPMG's oldest predecessor, the firm of Klijnveld Kraayenhof & Co., traces its origins to an Amsterdam trading house founded in 1818. The K in KPMG stands for Piet Klijnveld, a Dutch accountant who founded an accounting practice in Amsterdam in 1917. The P stands for William Barclay Peat, a Scottish accountant who founded his practice in London in 1870. The M stands for James Marwick, an American who co-founded Marwick Mitchell & Co. in New York in 1897. The G stands for Reinhard Goerdeler, a German accountant. It took until 1987 for all four national traditions to unite under a single name.

KPMG was created in 1987 through the merger of Peat Marwick International and KMG (Klijnveld Main Goerdeler). The combined name KPMG was chosen because neither side would accept the other's name as primary. The firm's own employees struggled to explain what the letters stood for. Partners from the two legacy firms reportedly maintained their separate cultures and rivalries for years after the official merger.

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.

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 gave it a clean bill of health just two weeks before SVB collapsed in March 2023 — the second largest bank failure in U.S. history. KPMG had signed off on SVB's financial statements without flagging the bank's 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.