The Prime Minister’s Office(PMO) has called for a high-level meeting on September 23, to discuss the prospects of articulating the indigenous accounting firms in line with the popular ‘Big Four’ companies. The meeting is said to address the issues such as easing regulations, rationalizing the compliance measures that are crucial to create the domestic audit and consultancy firms. The decision aims to reduce the dependence on the global giants and seek self-reliance in the domain of auditing and consultancy. It also aims to craft world-class Indian firms parallel to the ‘Big Four’ through which India can have a firm global footing in the mammoth auditing and consultancy industry that is worth of USD 240 billion.
The meeting will be chaired by Shaktikanta Das, Principle Secretary to the Prime Minister. Senior officials from the PMO and from the Ministry of Finance and Corporate Affairs will attend the meeting. The meeting comes just days after the Ministry of Corporate Affairs welcomed the inputs and suggestions from the concerned stakeholders for the purpose of creating a home-grown yet world-class multidisciplinary consultancy firms. The aim is to nurture an umbrella institution where chartered accountants, company secretaries, lawyers and other related professionals would be able to work together.
As per the prevailing regulations, there are restrictions to create such multidisciplinary consultancy firms. The PMO meeting thus aims at easing these restrictions and facilitates the creation of the world-class auditing and consultancy firms in the country. Many other gridlocks in the path also has to be eradicated such as removal of ban on advertising and marketing, creating a single-window licensing and compliance system for many professional services, support for global collaboration, eradication of capital constraints and facilitation for fund raising etc.
The ‘Four Big’ firms dominate the Indian auditing ecosystem
Currently, the popular ‘Four Big’ firms namely, EY, Deloitte, KPMG and PwC are dominating the Indian auditing and consultancy industry. These firms render auditing and consultancy services to the majority of the Nifty-500 companies. The total revenue generated by the ‘Big Four’ companies by its services to India amounts to more than Rs. 45,000 crore. Thus, the aim is to off-load the dependence on these foreign firms and create India’s own auditing ecosystem, thus carve the country’s place in the global auditing and consultancy market and render state-of-the-art services across the globe, beyond India.
In this direction, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2017 had called for the creation and facilitation of the atleast four large home-grown auditing and consultancy firms that would be indeed scaled among the world’s top eight companies.
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