---
title: The Big Four Sell Hours. You Need Answers.
description: Second passport case study
image: https://freedom.globalcitizenconsult.com/hubfs/BigFour_Illustration.jpeg
---

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Global Citizen second passport cross border strategy

# The Big Four Sell Hours. You Need Answers.

![Christophe Suchy, PhD](https://freedom.globalcitizenconsult.com/hs-fs/hubfs/DrSouche_Headshot4.png?width=48&height=48&name=DrSouche_Headshot4.png)

 Christophe Suchy, PhD

August 26, 2026

Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG billed roughly 220 billion dollars in their latest fiscal years and employ close to 1.5 million people. Those people are arranged in a pyramid. A wide base of juniors, a narrower band of managers, and a thin layer of partners at the top who share the profits. The pyramid has one operating requirement. Hours must flow up it. Every incentive inside the building points toward more people on the engagement, more weeks on the clock and a longer document at the end. Your problem is the raw material. The hours are the product.

I have sat on the client side of this for thirty years, as a founder, an acquirer, a board member and an advisor to families who move between countries. What follows is my view of why the model is failing, why the firms themselves now say so, and why a founder or family with a cross-border life is usually better served by a different kind of advisor.

## Too heavy

Hourly billing rewards inefficiency. That is the design, and it is why artificial intelligence is an existential problem for the Big Four and a pricing gift to everyone else. A firm that sells time cannot pass on the savings from doing the work faster without shrinking its own revenue, and it cannot shrink the pyramid without shrinking the revenue the pyramid produces.

Look at how the firms are responding. PwC cut 5,600 people in fiscal 2025 while growing revenue 2.7 percent, and its global chairman described the year as one of accelerated "reinvention." KPMG pushed out roughly one in ten of its US audit partners this spring, along with about 400 advisory staff. Deloitte US announced cuts to paid leave and pension contributions for part of its workforce. KPMG's UK graduate intake fell 29 percent in a single year. The head of KPMG's UK advisory business told the Financial Times that her ambition is for the organisation "to still exist," adding, "That's how disruptive I believe AI will be."

None of this has reached partner distributions. Average pay per partner at the UK firms in 2025 ran from 787,000 pounds at EY to 1.05 million at Deloitte. The pyramid is being trimmed from the bottom and defended at the top, and the defence is funded by the client.

Compare the direction of travel elsewhere. McKinsey now ties roughly a quarter of its fees to performance rather than hours. Unity Advisory, launched in 2025 by EY's former UK chairman and PwC UK's former chief operating officer with 300 million dollars from Warburg Pincus, sells itself to mid-market clients on "really low administrative cost," AI-led delivery and, in the chairman's words, "crucially, no conflicts." When the people who ran these firms leave to compete against them, the pitch they choose tells you what their old clients had been complaining about.

## Too bureaucratic

A firm of 400,000 people is governed by its risk function, and the risk function answers to the last scandal rather than to you. In April 2025 PwC pulled out of more than a dozen countries, including ten member firms in francophone Africa, after years of pressing local partners to drop clients judged too risky. Those partners reported losing more than a third of their business to the purge. The decision came from global leadership. The clients were the last consideration.

The same machinery shapes what you are allowed to hear. An advisory partner at a Big Four firm works under independence rules written for the audit side of the house, under global risk policies, and under a brand that cannot afford to be named in a parliamentary inquiry. EY spent around 600 million dollars trying to separate its consulting business from its audit business to escape those constraints. The project collapsed in 2023 when the partners could not agree on how to divide the firm, the tax practice above all. The conflict remains, and the client pays for it in advice that has been filtered for the firm's protection before it reaches the room.

Then there is the deliverable. In 2025 Deloitte produced a 440,000 Australian dollar report for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations that contained fabricated academic citations and a quotation attributed to a Federal Court judgment that did not exist. A university researcher noticed. Deloitte refunded the final instalment and disclosed, in the corrected version, that a generative AI model had been used. Weeks later a Deloitte report for the government of Newfoundland and Labrador, priced at 1.6 million Canadian dollars, was found to cite papers that were never written. A document that long, priced that high, that nobody inside the firm read closely enough to catch a judge saying words he never said. That is what the pyramid produces when hours are the point.

Australia's Senate spent more than a year on the question and concluded in 2024 that the country's reliance on the Big Four had limited the capability of its own public service and created "serious conflicts of interest." Senator Deborah O'Neill, who drove the inquiry, said the sector had been "operating in the shadows way too long." Mariana Mazzucato's book on the industry, The Big Con, makes the broader case: the business model depends on the client never learning to do the work itself.

## Too rigid

The phrase you hear in defence of the Big Four is that they are "by the book." The book belongs to the firm, and the record of the last three years shows how it gets applied. A PwC Australia partner who had helped Treasury design a new anti-avoidance law shared confidential details of it with colleagues and clients before the law was published, and the firm marketed structures around it. When the story broke in 2023, the chief executive stepped down, eight partners left, and the government consulting arm was sold to a private equity fund for one Australian dollar. A Senate committee concluded the firm had pursued a "deliberate strategy" to cover up the breach. In China, regulators fined PwC 62 million dollars and suspended its mainland audit arm for six months in 2024 after finding it had "turned a blind eye" to a 78 billion dollar fraud at Evergrande. KPMG Netherlands paid a record 25 million dollar penalty to the US audit regulator for years of answer sharing on internal exams. The Dutch arms of Deloitte, PwC and EY paid a further 8.5 million between them for the same thing. EY Germany was barred for two years from taking on new listed audit clients after Wirecard.

In fairness, the firms' US audit inspection results improved sharply in 2025, with the combined deficiency rate falling to 8 percent from 26 percent two years earlier. Audit is what the Big Four are for. When a listed company needs a signature the market recognises, it should hire one of them.

Rigidity in advisory work is a different matter. It means the answer to your question was decided before you asked it, by a policy committee that has never met you and is managing the firm's exposure rather than your position. It means a structure that is lawful, well documented and right for your family gets rejected because a partner in another country would rather not have to explain it. You are paying for their caution about themselves.

## What a sounding board does instead

A founder with companies in two countries and a family spread across three, whose tax residence no longer matches where life actually happens, does not need a pyramid. What that founder needs is one experienced person who will sit with the whole picture, argue with them, and say what they would do in their place.

That is the work Gail and I do at Global Citizen Consulting. I have built companies, sat on boards, worked on cross-border acquisitions and moved my own life across jurisdictions, and every client conversation is with one of us. The Strategic Discovery Session is a fixed fee agreed before we start, with no meter running. The deliverable is a plan written to be executed, covering seven dimensions: tax, residency and citizenship, banking, asset protection, business structuring, family and lifestyle, and implementation. After delivery we stay with the client for twelve months, because a plan nobody implements is just a longer document.

If you have been paying for hours and receiving documents, [book a Strategic Discovery Session](https://insights.globalcitizenconsult.com).

---

## Sources

1. Deloitte FY2025 revenue and headcount: [Deloitte reports FY2025 revenue](https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/about/press-room/global-revenue-announcement.html)
2. PwC FY2025 revenue, 364,000 headcount, "reinvention" quote: [PwC global revenues rise to US$56.9 billion](https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2025/pwc-global-revenues-rise.html); 5,600 headcount reduction: [CFO Brew, PwC cuts head count amid slowing revenue growth](https://www.cfobrew.com/stories/2025/11/03/pwc-cuts-head-count-amid-slowing-revenue-growth)
3. EY FY2025 revenue and 406,209 headcount: [EY announces global revenue of US$53.2b](https://www.ey.com/en_gl/newsroom/2025/10/ey-announces-global-revenue-of-us-53-2b-for-fiscal-year-2025)
4. KPMG FY2025 revenue and 276,030 headcount: [KPMG delivers 5.1% rise in global revenue](https://kpmg.com/xx/en/media/press-releases/2025/12/kpmg-delivers-rise-in-global-revenue.html); [Going Concern analysis](https://www.goingconcern.com/kpmg-reports-39-8-billion-in-revenue-for-2025-with-several-asterisks/)
5. Hourly billing rewards inefficiency; pyramid analysis: [Consultancy.uk, Big Four business models face moment of reckoning with rise of AI, July 2026](https://www.consultancy.uk/news/45185/big-four-business-models-face-moment-of-reckoning-with-rise-of-ai)
6. KPMG US audit partner and advisory cuts, May 2026: [CFO Dive](https://www.cfodive.com/news/kpmg-cuts-us-advisory-audit-partners-accounting-layoffs/819135/); [Accounting Today](https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/kpmg-lays-off-10-of-us-audit-partners)
7. Deloitte US benefit cuts, April 2026: [HR Brew](https://www.hr-brew.com/stories/2026/04/20/deloitte-us-to-cut-benefits-for-segment-of-employees-amid-job-architecture-reshuffle)
8. UK graduate intake cuts by firm: [Scottish Financial News, June 2025](https://www.scottishfinancialnews.com/articles/big-four-slash-graduate-jobs-as-ai-takes-over-entry-level-tasks)
9. KPMG UK advisory head quote (Financial Times, as reported by): [Resultsense, May 2026](https://www.resultsense.com/news/2026-05-28-ai-consulting-big-four-reckoning/)
10. UK partner pay 2025: [Fortune via AOL, KPMG's UK partners took home $1.2 million](https://www.aol.com/articles/kpmgs-uk-partners-took-home-130724355.html)
11. McKinsey performance-based fees: [TheStreet, May 2026](https://www.thestreet.com/markets/ai-is-forcing-mckinsey-bcg-bain-to-rethink-consulting-fees)
12. Unity Advisory launch and Varley quote: [Consultancy.uk, April 2025](https://www.consultancy.uk/news/39958/big-four-challenger-unity-advisory-launches-with-backing-of-private-equity)
13. PwC country exits and client purges: [Irish Times / Financial Times, April 2025](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/04/16/pwc-exits-more-than-a-dozen-countries-in-push-to-avoid-scandals/)
14. EY Project Everest cost: [Going Concern](https://www.goingconcern.com/project-everest-burned-a-bigger-hole-in-eys-pocket-than-we-thought/); [Accountancy Age, The rise and fall of EY's Project Everest](https://accountancyage.com/2024/02/13/the-rise-and-fall-of-eys-project-everest/)
15. Deloitte Australia report and refund: [Fortune, October 2025](https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/deloitte-ai-australia-government-report-hallucinations-technology-290000-refund); [CFO Dive on the refund amount](https://www.cfodive.com/news/deloitte-refunds-60k-report-ai-errors-australian-government-accounting/803321/)
16. Deloitte Newfoundland and Labrador report: [Fortune, November 2025](https://fortune.com/2025/11/25/deloitte-caught-fabricated-ai-generated-research-million-dollar-report-canada-government); [CBC News](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-deloitte-citations-9.6990216)
17. Australian Senate inquiry findings, June 2024: [ABC News](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-12/big-four-consultancies-new-rules-senate-final-report/103967978)
18. Mazzucato and Collington, The Big Con (2023): [Publisher page](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710959/the-big-con-by-mariana-mazzucato-and-rosie-collington/)
19. PwC Australia tax leak: [International Tax Review timeline](https://www.internationaltaxreview.com/article/2bsmy64lijnwqxksawow0/timeline-pwc-australia-and-the-tax-leaks-scandal); [Al Jazeera on the A$1 sale](https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/7/4/pwc-australia-sells-advisory-business-amid-tax-leak-scandal); [Wikipedia summary of the Senate findings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC_tax_scandal)
20. PwC China fine and suspension: [Insurance Journal / Reuters, September 2024](https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2024/09/13/792809.htm); [CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/business/china-fines-pwc-evergrande-collapse/index.html)
21. KPMG Netherlands $25m fine: [PCAOB release](https://pcaobus.org/news-events/news-releases/news-release-detail/pcaob-imposes-record--25-million-fine-on-kpmg-netherlands-and-bars-a-firm-leader-after-exam-cheating--misinforming-investigators); Dutch Deloitte, PwC, EY fines: [CPA Practice Advisor, June 2025](https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2025/06/25/pcaob-doles-out-8-5m-in-total-fines-to-most-of-the-big-fours-dutch-affiliates-for-exam-cheating/163729/)
22. EY Germany Wirecard ban: [Compliance Week](https://www.complianceweek.com/regulatory-enforcement/ey-germany-receives-two-year-ban-over-wirecard-audit-work/32914.article)
23. PCAOB 2025 inspection results: [Thomson Reuters, August 2026](https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/big-four-firms-show-significant-improvement-in-pcaob-audit-inspection-results-for-2025/)

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