My wife wants to join a Big 4 or national public accounting firm so she can get experience with publicly-traded clients. My understanding is that there are 5,000 publicly traded companies in the USA.
Is it a top heavy distribution where the top 4-6 public accounting firms are auditting 4900 of those clients and those 4-6 firms are the only game in town?
Is there some master list that shows all the publicly traded companies in one column and their independent auditor in another column? (if there isn’t, someone ought to make one!)
There are regional firms too outside the Big 4. In the tri-state one is EisnerAmper. I imagine wherever you are there are similar companies. Search this list to see if any of these have offices near you. Due to the nature of public accounting I have to assume that most clients are public. I think the difference between the Big 4 and smaller firms might be your role working with them. I think an unqualified audit opinion from Delloite carries more weight than XYZ, but I would still use XYZ to calculate something. http://www.accountancyage.com/digital_assets/6839/All_int_charts_2013_v2.pdf
As somebody who used to audit public companies at a big 4 firm, if she cares about her resume, its Big 4 or hacksaw. If you go regional or local, it’s 2nd tier all the way from there on out. I worked for a regional firm for a while and we had virtually no public clients. It was mostly private LLCs and LPs that had an audit as a requirement on their loans or whatever. The folks I know who worked there, are either still there years later, or are working at some other sh*tty local/regional firm. To get a good job post accounting, Big 4 experience is a virtual necessity.
My second piece of advice, is don’t work for a Big 4 firm to do public company audits. It’s crappy money relative to the hours worked. Most public company audits are doing boring busy work, ticking and tying the same schedules every quarter, and when you’re not doing that, you’re doing prep work for the 10K. Most people on public clients only work on one because they are year round clients. Mobility between clients depends on your firm and office.
well it’s like you said yourself: you dont work at Big 4 for the hourly wage - you work there for the experience on your resume. You dont count national firms as Big 4 equivs? I would think that auditing a publicly traded company makes you familiar with the same SEC filings and regulations, regardless of whether you’re at a large national firm or a big international firm?
No, I don’t and don’t really know anybody who does (besides the people who don’t work in Big 4, they think everybody’s equal). I think you’re also overestimating how much you learn about SEC filings and regulations. Audits are done by looking at stuff on a financial statement line item basis and in accordance with GAAP. Very little difference between public and private companies, other than Sarbanes Oxley compliance (which is complete busy work that we outsourced to the company’s internal audit department as much as possible).
The only SEC filings we did anything with were the 10Q and 10K, and we would go through it, make sure the numbers matched our audit records and were appropriately supported (as in, we did audit work which backed up the numbers). The SEC filings are prepared by the reporting accountants at the company, which is a job you get after you get your CPA and leave Big 4.
Now don’t get me wrong, you learn a ton about the companies and industries you audit, learn lots about their operations, not necessarly SEC filings, rules, and regs. I learned more about the different requirements now that I’m on the other side analyzing public companies and reading the filings for different companies.
Plz elaborate what you mean by “the other side”. Am I to take it that you’re on the buy side and that your job has to do with whether or not you want to buy shares of or entire companies?
^ Eh, technically I’m neither. Lets just say I work for an internationally recognized research and consulting firm that focuses on a certain industry. In the space of a day I’ll take a call from a true buy side client (like a hedge fund or asset manager) and talk about a potential investment or I’ll tell their target company why they suck/why they’re awesome.
Bottom line, I spend a f**k ton amount of time poring over 10Ks, IR presentations, having off the record conversations (mosiac theory FTW!), and so on…