Regulators, who will have to rubber stamp the demerger, and companies should be asking how EY would replace the experts needed to carry out quality audits, said Ms Peters, a former partner at KPMG. “There’s $5 trillion of goodwill on the books of US public companies that needs to be impairment tested. Are those skills all staying on the audit side?”
“Anyone who sits there saying ‘you can have an audit-only firm with a few tax experts in it and that’s brilliant for audit quality’ [has] completely missed the point,” said a senior partner at another Big Four firm. Under the planned split, the separate advisory business would begin with revenues of $25 billion and ebitda of $4.4 billion, according to figures shared with partners last week.