Industry Transformation

Who Owns the Auditors? Inside Private Equity’s Race to Buy the Accounting Profession.

Private equity is pouring billions into accounting firms, turning traditional partnerships into acquisition-driven platforms. Behind the rush lies a succession crisis, an expensive technology race and a bet that trusted client relationships can be consolidated, automated and sold—without compromising the independence on which the profession depends.

The Financial Curio · World

For most of its modern history, public accounting operated by a relatively stable formula.

Partners owned the firm. Younger accountants worked toward partnership. Profits were distributed annually. Retiring partners were bought out gradually by the generation behind them. The firm’s most valuable assets—its reputation, relationships and professional judgment—were difficult to separate from the people who worked there.

That structure is now being dismantled.

Over the past several years, private-equity firms have poured billions of dollars into accounting practices, financing acquisitions, combining regional firms and transforming national partnerships into institutional investment platforms.

The most dramatic example arrived in July 2026, when private-equity-backed Grant Thornton Advisors agreed to acquire CBIZ for an enterprise value of $5 billion. The transaction, described as the largest of its kind in more than 25 years, is expected to create the fifth-largest U.S. provider of professional, tax and advisory services, generating more than $5 billion in annual domestic revenue.

The deal is even more significant because CBIZ had completed its own $2.3 billion acquisition of Marcum less than two years earlier. Marcum brought approximately $1.2 billion in revenue, 3,500 professionals and one of the country’s largest portfolios of public-company audit clients outside the Big Four.

In effect, Grant Thornton is buying a company that had only recently completed one of the accounting industry’s largest-ever combinations.

Elsewhere, Baker Tilly combined with Moss Adams to create a firm with more than $3 billion in revenue and approximately 11,500 employees. Citrin Cooperman, initially backed by New Mountain Capital, was later sold to a Blackstone-led group at a reported valuation exceeding $2 billion. Other private-equity-backed firms have completed dozens of smaller acquisitions across tax, assurance, technology, wealth management, outsourced accounting and transaction advisory.

These are not isolated transactions.

They are evidence that accounting is being reorganized around capital.

Why accounting—and why now?

Accounting does not look like the typical private-equity target.

It has few physical assets. Its employees can leave. Its clients often depend on individual relationships. Audit work is heavily regulated, and outside investors generally cannot directly own licensed CPA firms.

But beneath those complications, accounting possesses many of the characteristics private equity values most.

Accounting firms generate recurring revenue. Businesses must file tax returns, close their books, comply with regulations, maintain financial records and, in many cases, obtain audits regardless of economic conditions.

Client relationships can last for decades. Revenue is often predictable. Capital expenditure has historically been modest. The U.S. market remains highly fragmented among thousands of local and regional firms.

Most importantly, many of those firms face a succession problem.

The traditional partnership model assumes that younger accountants will eventually become partners and use future profits to finance the retirement of the generation ahead of them. But firms are struggling to recruit and retain enough people willing to follow that path.

Accounting graduates have declined in recent years, even as demand for accounting services remains substantial. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects approximately 124,200 openings for accountants and auditors annually between 2024 and 2034, much of it resulting from retirements and workers leaving the profession.

That creates a problem for current firm owners: their businesses may be valuable, but the traditional internal market of future partners capable of purchasing that value is weakening.

Private equity offers an immediate solution.

Senior partners can receive cash at closing, retain equity in the new organization and potentially earn a second payout when the business is refinanced, sold to another investor or taken public.

Instead of waiting years for younger partners to fund retirement obligations, existing owners can monetize a significant portion of the firm immediately.

Technology provides the second reason.

Modern accounting firms must invest in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, data analytics, workflow systems and offshore delivery operations. Those investments are increasingly difficult to finance through a partnership that distributes most of its earnings every year.

Private equity introduces permanent—or at least longer-duration—capital that can be used to acquire technology, centralize operations and purchase competitors.

The third reason is more circular: private equity itself has made private equity increasingly necessary.

Historically, accounting-firm acquisitions could be financed through future payments to retiring partners. But PE-backed buyers can offer sellers larger cash payments at closing.

That changes expectations throughout the market. Independent firms competing for acquisitions must either raise outside capital, borrow more heavily or accept that they will lose potential deals to better-funded competitors.

In Accounting Today’s 2025 private-equity survey, firm leaders described reaching the limits of traditional bank financing and needing additional capital to remain competitive in an increasingly consolidated market. One observed that PE-backed buyers had effectively changed the economics of firm acquisitions by increasing the amount of cash sellers expected upfront.

Private equity is not merely responding to consolidation.

It is accelerating it—and creating the conditions that make further consolidation difficult to resist.

From partnership to platform

The terminology used in these transactions is revealing.

Accounting firms are increasingly described not as partnerships, but as “platforms.”

A platform is designed to acquire smaller firms, centralize their administrative functions, standardize their technology and sell additional services across the combined client base.

The local accounting practice once built around a group of partners becomes part of a larger financial-services distribution system.

A tax client can be introduced to wealth management. An audit client can be sold cybersecurity or transaction advisory services. A business owner can be offered outsourced accounting, employee benefits, valuation, insurance and succession planning.

The underlying asset is no longer simply the work performed for the client.

It is the client relationship itself.

This is why investors are interested in accounting despite the relatively modest growth of traditional audit and tax services. Once acquired, those relationships can serve as distribution channels for higher-margin services.

Academic research presented through the PCAOB describes the emerging playbook clearly: establish an anchor firm, complete serial acquisitions, expand into new services and geographies, offshore staff-level work, introduce technology and move compensation toward performance-based incentives.

The firm becomes less dependent on individual partners and more dependent on the platform’s brand, technology, centralized systems and capital.

That is the fundamental transformation underway.

The strange separation of ownership and professional control

Private-equity ownership of accounting firms requires an unusual legal structure.

Because licensed CPAs must control attest practices, most transactions divide the organization into two related entities.

The audit practice remains within a CPA-owned firm. Tax, advisory, technology, administrative and other non-attest services are transferred to an investor-backed company.

The two organizations then operate through contractual agreements under a shared or closely connected brand.

Legally, the audit firm remains independent.

Economically, however, it may depend on the investor-owned business for employees, technology, office space, administration, marketing and other essential services.

This creates one of the central unresolved questions surrounding the accounting buyout:

Can an audit firm remain genuinely independent when much of the surrounding organization is owned by investors whose returns depend on revenue growth, cost reduction and an eventual exit?

Research examining private-equity relationships with attest firms found that influence may occur not through explicit interference with audit conclusions, but through budgets, growth expectations, compensation arrangements and strategic decisions affecting the broader organization.

That distinction matters.

Audit independence can be weakened without an investor ever ordering an auditor to change an opinion. Pressure can instead emerge through staffing levels, promotion decisions, technology budgets, client-retention targets or the resources allocated to difficult engagements.

Private equity did not create the conflict between professional responsibility and commercial incentives. Accounting partnerships have always needed to generate profits.

But outside ownership introduces new obligations to a new boss: debt must be serviced, investor returns must be achieved, acquisitions must be integrated and the business must eventually provide a path to liquidity.

A traditional partnership could theoretically operate indefinitely. A private-equity investment normally has an exit somewhere in its future.

What happens to accountants?

The immediate fear is that consolidation and artificial intelligence will result in mass layoffs.

The more likely outcome is more nuanced.

Demand for accountants is not going to disappear. Regulatory complexity, tax rules, financial reporting, fraud, business formation and investor scrutiny continue to create demand for competent accountants. Federal projections still anticipate employment growth for accountants and auditors over the next decade.

But the type of work—and the way firms value the people performing it—is what is changing.

Large platforms can automate straightforward and standardized processes, move routine work to offshore centers and deploy a single technology system across thousands of employees.

That places pressure on work involving:

Basic tax-return preparation;
Manual audit documentation;
Repetitive bookkeeping;
Administrative coordination;
Standard reconciliations;
Data entry and document processing.

At the same time, firms are likely to pay premiums for professionals who can:

Manage important client relationships;
Exercise complex judgment;
Investigate fraud;
Advise on transactions;
Interpret uncertain tax rules;
Design and supervise automated systems;
Provide industry-specific expertise;
Review the output of AI and offshore teams.

The future accountant may produce fewer workpapers personally but supervise more technology, evaluate more exceptions and communicate more directly with clients.

The traditional career ladder may also change.

Under the partnership model, young professionals accepted difficult hours partly because they could aspire to ownership. In a PE-backed firm, that ownership path may become broader through employee equity—or narrower if meaningful equity is concentrated among senior leaders and investors.

Partners may also find that the title carries less autonomy than it once did. Compensation can become more closely tied to sales, profitability, utilization and cross-selling. Local offices may lose control over hiring, pricing and technology decisions.

Early evidence suggests the experience varies considerably. Accounting Today found that partners at PE-backed firms were substantially more likely than other employees to report satisfaction with the arrangement. Other respondents reported declining morale, reduced bonuses, cultural disruption and employee departures.

That divide is understandable.

The partners who approve a transaction may receive significant liquidity. The employees who remain must live inside the operating model that follows.

What private equity is betting on

Private-equity investors are making several connected bets.

The first is that accounting firms can consolidate without losing too many clients or employees.

The second is that technology and offshoring can increase the amount of revenue each professional supports.

The third is that traditional tax and audit relationships can generate additional advisory revenue.

The fourth is that a small number of large platforms will eventually command higher valuations than fragmented regional partnerships.

The fifth is that future buyers will exist.

That final assumption is critical. A PE-backed accounting business will eventually be sold, recapitalized or listed publicly. Citrin Cooperman’s transfer from one private-equity owner to another demonstrated that a secondary market may exist for sufficiently large accounting platforms.

Grant Thornton’s acquisition of CBIZ pushes that thesis even further. It suggests that multibillion-dollar accounting platforms can now be assembled using the same financial machinery previously applied to healthcare practices, insurance brokers and technology-services companies.

The ultimate ambition may be to create firms that are large enough to go public, sell to larger sponsors or become permanent consolidators in their own right.

What comes next

The accounting buyout is probably entering its second stage.

The first stage involved private-equity firms purchasing stakes in large accounting partnerships.

The second will involve those firms using their capital to acquire one another, absorb regional competitors and consolidate international networks.

Grant Thornton’s expansion offers an early preview. After receiving private-equity backing, its U.S. organization pursued combinations with member firms in several countries, challenging the traditional model in which international accounting networks consist of independently owned national practices.

The next several years are likely to produce five major developments.

1. More large combinations

Smaller acquisitions will continue, but the defining deals may increasingly involve top-20 firms combining with one another.

There are only so many regional practices large enough to materially change the scale of a national platform. Once the most attractive independent targets have been acquired, consolidators will begin buying other consolidators.

2. A race to become the alternative to the Big Four

Grant Thornton–CBIZ, Baker Tilly and other large middle-market firms are not necessarily trying to compete directly with Deloitte, PwC, EY or KPMG for the world’s largest multinational audits.

They are attempting to dominate the vast market beneath them: privately held companies, mid-cap public businesses, private-equity portfolio companies, wealthy families and regional institutions.

The result may be a new group of national platforms with the capital, technology and geographic reach to challenge the Big Four in selected markets.

3. Greater separation between audit and everything else

Audit may increasingly function as a protected professional practice attached to a much larger commercial-services organization.

That structure could preserve audit licensing rules while allowing investors to own most of the economically attractive surrounding business.

Regulators will likely pay closer attention to whether the legal separation also produces genuine operational and financial independence.

4. Increasing pressure on independent midsized firms

Independent firms will not disappear. Some will remain highly profitable by specializing in particular industries, complex tax issues, forensic accounting or high-value advisory work.

But firms offering broadly similar services without significant scale or specialization will face pressure from both directions.

Large platforms will possess more technology, capital and recruiting reach. Small technology-enabled practices may operate with lower overhead.

The firms most exposed may be those large enough to carry substantial costs but too small to spread those costs across a national client base.

5. A reckoning over quality and trust

For private equity, accounting represents predictable revenue and an opportunity for consolidation.

For the public, accounting performs a different function.

Auditors verify information on which investors, lenders, regulators and markets rely. Tax professionals interpret systems that determine what businesses and individuals owe governments. Accountants often serve as the final internal defense against fraud, manipulation and financial disorder.

The central question is therefore not whether private equity can make accounting firms larger.

It almost certainly can.

The question is whether it can make them larger, faster and more profitable without weakening the skepticism, independence, professional judgment and quality of clients work and relationships on which their value ultimately depends.

The profession’s new bargain

Private equity is arriving now because the traditional accounting partnership is confronting several problems simultaneously: retiring owners, a constrained talent pipeline, expensive technology requirements, fragmented competition and growing demand for upfront acquisition capital.

Private equity offers solutions to all of them.

It gives retiring partners liquidity. It funds acquisitions. It finances technology. It centralizes operations and creates the scale necessary to deploy automation across large client bases.

But the money does not arrive without changing the institution that receives it.

A partnership is intended to transfer a profession from one generation to the next.

A private-equity platform is intended to increase in value and eventually provide an exit.

Those objectives can coexist—but they are not identical.

What is happening in accounting is therefore bigger than a merger cycle. It is a transfer of economic power: from partners whose wealth was tied primarily to annual firm profits, to investors whose wealth depends on the future sale value of the platform.

The coming years will reveal whether this new model revitalizes an aging and technologically constrained profession—or turns one of the economy’s most important institutions into another industry optimized for financial extraction.

Either way, the era of the independent accounting partnership is ending.

The era of the accounting platform has begun.