Deloitte Overview: Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu is one of the Big Four international public accounting firms. Deloitte, headquartered in New York, has a complex organizational structure with a number of independent member firms divided among functional and/or regional lines. Member firms are organized as partnerships. Its main lines of business include:
- Assurance (Audit)
- Consulting
- Mergers and Acquisitions
- Tax
Size: Deloitte operates in 142 countries, through 69 member firms. These figures are as of May, 2007:
- Employees (worldwide) = 165,000
- Employees (U.S.) = 40,998
- CPAs (U.S.) = 8,108
- Partners (U.S.) = 2,758
- Offices (U.S.) = 101
Positives: By 5/31/2010, total employees had grown to 169,000. In an August 22, 2011 Wall Street Journal interview ("For Deloitte CEO, Hard Economic Times Are Nothing New"), new CEO Joe Echevarria discussed plans to hire 18,000 employees during the fiscal year that ends on June 30, 2012. Echevarria indicates that the drive to add new talent would be only marginally affected by a double dip recession, in which case new hires would still be a robust 17,000 or so. To what extent these figures represent net new hires, as opposed to replacement hires spurred by employee turnover, is not detailed by Echevarria.
According to the same article, Deloitte is the world's largest professional services firm by revenues, with revenues of $10.9 billion for the fiscal year ending in June 2010, just off the high of $11 billion for the year ending in June 2008. Revenues for the fiscal year ending in June 2011 were not yet released as of the article.
Additionally, the firm is spending $300 million on a major training and continuing education facility in Texas, dubbed Deloitte University, to open in October 2011.
Negatives: The federal Public Company Accounting Oversight Board leveled various criticisms against Deloitte in a confidential May 2011 report, including:
- The firm lacks procedures to ensure that audits are sufficiently thorough.
- Auditors do not show sufficient skepticism.
- Employee training programs are not rigorous enough.
- The system for monitoring Deloitte affiliates outside the U.S. is deficient.
These critiques were made public in October 2011, presumably because Deloitte has not taken sufficient measures, in the regulators' eyes, to remedy them. This is the first time, according to The Wall Street Journal ("Deloitte's '08 Flaws Laid Out In Rebuke," October 18, 2011), that a Big Four accounting firm has been publicly reprimanded in this fashion.
Other Positives and Negatives: See discussion under the public accounting firms overview.
