The Big Five were a group of accountancy firms who handled the vast majority of audits for publicly traded corporations. As of early 2002, The Big Five firms were:

• Arthur Andersen
• Deloitte & Touche (formed by merger of Touche Ross and Deloitte Haskins & Sells)
• Ernst & Young (formed by merger of Ernst & Ernst and Arthur Young)
• KPMG (formed by merger of Peat Marwick Mitchell and KMG group)
• PricewaterhouseCoopers (formed by merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand)

In the wake of the Enron scandal, Arthur Andersen has effectively been removed as one of the Big Five, reducing the Big Five to the Big Four. The term descends via Big Six from Big Eight,the ancestor firms noted above apart from KMG having been numbered among the eight.

External links

• http://www.big5friends.com/
• http://www.bigfivetalent.com/
• http://www.exbigfive.com/
• http://www.financedirector.com/bigfive/
• http://raw.rutgers.edu/raw/internet/big5.htm Rutgers Accounting Web chart of links to Big Five accounting firms