We’ve received this tip a few times now from a few different people, time to throw it to dogs and see if anyone knows more. Here’s the original, slightly edited to protect anonymity:
Plante Moran, CBIZ, Marcum, Armanino, and a couple of other large public firms will no longer be serving public clients. It does look like CBIZ has left or is leaving the space. If the others are true, that’s a lot of free agent clients and probably a fair amount of pain for whoever picks them up.
Another tipster said CBIZ was trimming staff in audit “in connection with that” though we didn’t get any numbers because no one ever talks about CBIZ, you probably forgot they existed until just now. A couple others have confirmed they’ve heard about CBIZ pulling out but nothing solid. FWIW CBIZ was posting audit senior associate job openings on its website as recently as yesterday and an audit intern job posted today says interns will “assist in planning multiple audit assignments in Real Estate, Construction, Nonprofit, Manufacturing and many more industries.”
Per Ideagen Audit Analytics’ “Who Audits Public Companies” published in June, as of May 14, 2023 there were 258 firms conducting audits for 6,950 Securities and Exchange Commission registrants. As we already know, Big 4 dominates the large accelerated filers category.
The top ten firms collectively audit 68% of the total population. In comparison to our 2020, 2021, and 2022 analyses, this is the first year where the top ten audit firms remained static in terms of market concentration for SEC registrants. While the majority of the top ten firms managed to increase their clientele from 2022, Withum decreased in rank. They fell from sixth to ninth, auditing 177 clients in 2023 compared to 296 clients in 2022.
Of the firms mentioned in the tip above, only Marcum made the list of top ten audit firms (excluding SPACs, that’s a sore subject for Marcum anyway):
Given the PCAOB’s sudden enthusiasm for enforcement, and given that audit isn’t exactly a license to print money, maybe there’s something to this. Who needs the headache?
If you’ve heard about this or just want to speculate wildly, have at it in the comments or shoot me an email. I’ll do some digging in the meantime. It’s the Friday after Labor Day, there’s nothing else going on.
Small update: I spoke to someone this afternoon who digs through 8-Ks for fun (or work, whatever), they said what they’ve noticed lately would confirm this to be true. Definitely warrants further digging.
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