It’s official. Despite the attention-grabbing negative headlines about the profession over the past two years, a majority of large U.S. public companies say that by and large, they’re satisfied with their current auditor.
The findings were derived from a General Accounting Office study of 159 public corporations to get their views on audit fees, quality, independence and choice.
The majority said they were more than happy with their auditor, and roughly half had indicated they’d had the same auditing firm for at least 10 years.
Drilling down into the open-ended responses of the survey, the GAO did find that many companies were worried about the slim pickings for top auditing firms now that Andersen is gone, and the formerly Big Eight have now been whittled down to the Big Four. Eighty-four percent of those polled said they’d prefer the marketplace had more choices for them, since they would only give their business to a global auditing firm.
