Big Four Shunned SPAC IPOs But Now Flock to Audit New Companies

When SPACs became Wall Street’s favorite way to take companies public, the Big Four accounting firms steered clear, leaving audit work to smaller outfits churning out hundreds of fast, cheap audits of the blank-check vehicles.

For those freshly minted public companies that emerged from the boom, it’s been a different story. The largest firms — Deloitte & Touche LLP, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, KPMG LLP, Ernst & Young LLP and their affiliates— audit almost two-thirds of the approximately 330 companies that went public through special purpose acquisition companies since 2020 and are still trading today, according to Bloomberg data. EY and its ...