‘Fairly optimal’: Big four earn 99.3pc of top companies’ audit fees
The big four accounting firms earned 99.3 per cent of audit fees paid by Australia’s 200 largest listed companies last year, a proportion described as “to be expected” in any competitive market.
PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and EY audited 96.5 per cent, or 193, of the top 200 companies in Australia in 2022, up from 94.5 per cent in 2019, the University of New South Wales research found.
Amir Ghandar of the CA ANZ says Australia’s audit market concentration is similar to other jurisdictions.
Although one academic said the concentration of fees and clients in the ASX 200 showed that the market was an oligopoly, a representative of professional body Chartered Accountants ANZ played down the dominance of the big four at the top end of town.
Amir Ghandar, CA ANZ’s assurance and reporting leader, also played down the big four’s market share of ASX 200 firms, instead emphasising the reduction of the firms’ audit market share across medium and small companies.
He said the concentration of the big four firms in the auditing market for major listed companies was similar to that of other major jurisdictions.
“[T]he overall market share of the big four audit firms is not nearly so concentrated, and these preliminary findings indicate that share has continued to decrease in line with the trend over the last 10 years or so,” Mr Ghandar said.
Chartered Accountants ANZ, which co-funded the research with CPA Australia, is the main professional body for big four partners.
CPA Australia head of policy and advocacy Elinor Kasapidis says the big four’s dominance is ‘to be expected’.
Elinor Kasapidis, head of policy and advocacy at CPA Australia, said the concentration at the top end of the audit market was “the nature of any competitive market and
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