A small firm in Henderson, Nevada, Bush & Associates, topped the list of those with the most new Securities and Exchange Commission audit clients in 2024, followed by Big Four firm KPMG — but the audit firm that had what was likely the biggest impact on the market isn’t on the list at all.

Bush & Associates added 32 new SEC clients and netted 30 over the course of last year, while KPMG added 39 and netted 23. (See “Net engagement leaders.”)

Almost half of Bush’s new clients — 14 out of 32 — came from one-time star BF Borgers, which was permanently suspended from practice by the commission in May, and whose demise amid a welter of accusations of improper practice sent a huge number of clients out into the market seeking new auditors.

A significant number of firms picked up clients that had been with Borgers, including:

• Michael Gillespie & Associates, with 15 Borgers clients;
• Boladale Lawal & Co., with 12;
• Fruci & Associates, with 10;
• Olayinka Oyebola & Co., with 9;
• Astra Audit, BCRG Group, and M&K CPAs, with six each; and,
• BartonCPA and Beckles & Co., with five each.

BF Borgers wasn’t the only firm whose clients were looking for new homes: Astra Audit picked up 13 new engagements in 2024 from Accell Audit & Compliance, which closed down its SEC practice, and the exit of Morison Cogen from the SEC market helped Stephano Slack pick up 11.

Most of these firm departures didn’t have much of an impact on the largest auditors (see “2024 total gains & losses“), but the combination of Top 10 Firms Marcum and CBIZ did shake out a large number of clients who were picked up by a wide range of firms.

Clients by filing status, and more

In terms of clients by filing status, KPMG led among new large accelerated filers, while Bush & Associates took the lead among non-accelerated filers and small reporting companies. (See “Audit leaders.“) Deloitte took on the most accelerated filers in 2024.

As you might expect, KPMG topped the league tables for new market capitalization audited, with the biggest contribution coming from Grayscale Bitcoin Trust’s $25.5 billion, as well as for new assets audited, with insurance underwriter Everest Group accounting for $49.3 billion and Grayscale Bitcoin Trust for $26.4 billion. It came in second for new audit fees, energy distribution and services company UGI Corp. the biggest slice, at $9 million, and all the rest of its clients scattered below that. (See “New client leaders.“)

Deloitte was No. 1 for new audit fees, with dental instrument and supply provider Dentsply Sirona Inc. coming in at $11.8 million and 3D printing company 3D Systems Corp. at $10 million, and all its other clients below that. The firm came in second for new assets audited, with insurance holding company American National Group’s $79.9 billion and cruise line Carnival’s $49 billion standing out.

Finally, PwC took second in new market cap audited, with a big boost from semiconductor manufacturer Global Foundries Inc.’s $32.1 billion.

Data for the quarterly rankings are provided by Ideagen Audit Analytics, a premium online intelligence service delivering audit, regulatory and disclosure analysis. Reach them at (508) 476-7007, [email protected] or www.auditanalytics.com

Diversity, equity and inclusion is on the chopping block at accounting firms.

In a February media flurry, big firms like Deloitte and KPMG said they were scrapping their DEI goals and initiatives amid the current political landscape. Deloitte US dropped its DEI programs and asked its employees working on government contracts to remove gender pronouns from their email signatures. KPMG deleted the annual “transparency reports” that it has published since 2020 that detail its efforts to increase representation of women and minorities within the organization. 

As big firms pull back, and presumably more firms quietly do the same, it can be easy to assume that this is the end of DEI as we know it. But things may not be as bleak as they seem, some leaders say. 

“You have to look at the profession through a number of different lenses to really understand the impact,” said Jina Etienne, CEO of Etienne Consulting.

Staying the course, quietly

The wave of pullbacks — in the accounting profession and across broader corporate America — followed numerous executive orders issued by the Trump administration, including one order stating that the U.S. government would only recognize two sexes in all official documents and messaging, and mandating that “federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology” and government agencies should “ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology.” 

In particular, firms that are government contractors, or firms with clients who are federal contractors, risk losing their funding by keeping their “noncompliant” DEI programs up and running. 

“Organizations probably can’t really boast about what they are doing anymore,” said Crystal Cooke, director of diversity and inclusion at the American Institute of CPAs. “It’s not in their benefit if they’re trying to protect the people in their workplace, because if they make too much noise that makes them a target.”

“I hear a lot about people saying, ‘Why isn’t everyone being loud and proud?'” Cooke continued. “I feel you don’t have to be loud and proud to show your actions and how you support this. If you still see that organization doing things that support programming, if the people who work there feel like they are still being supported, then they are achieving their goals. We can’t always shout things from the rooftops, especially in this environment, because we just don’t know how it’ll affect people who could be impacted. But that doesn’t mean the work’s not being done.”

Accounting is a risk-averse profession by nature. Firms may not want to expose themselves to the reputational risk, or the possibility of losing clients, by publicizing their DEI efforts.

“As accountants, predominantly in public accounting, you have to stay under the radar. We do not want to attract attention to ourselves and give rise to questioning the quality, the independence,” Etienne said. “The assurance work that we do will no longer feel like assurance if we were under attack.”

Many firms, Etienne speculates, will minimize the publicity surrounding their DEI programs while still maintaining them internally. Some firms may drop the name “DEI” and swap it for less politicized language such as “culture,” “inclusion,” “wellbeing” and “belonging.” 

“The letters in a sequence D-E-I have become a word. That word has a meaning. It is so much more complex and nuanced than that,” Etienne said. “I’ve always struggled with and invited clients to decouple the terms and really think about the body of work that is behind diversity, equity and inclusion because they’re distinctly different things.” 

“But everyone is responding to ‘DEI,’ which the term now has been co-opted,” she continued. “It has been co-opted to mean reverse discrimination — that people who are not qualified for jobs are getting jobs, and people who should have jobs don’t have those jobs — and it’s all coded for race.”

The silver lining

Accounting firms have a strong impetus to keep their DEI programs active. Amid the profession’s ongoing talent crisis — with fewer students studying accounting, fewer earning their CPA license and even fewer staying in the profession until they make partner — DEI taps into under-recruited demographics and, thus, expands the talent pool. DEI is also crucial when it comes to retaining talent, especially young people.

(Read more: What can small firms do about DEI?)

“I think firms are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place because clients are looking at this and they don’t want to alienate clients,” said Jennifer Harrity-Cantero, ESG and sustainability director at Top 100 Firm Sensiba. “But the accounting world over the last few years has really seen what DEI can do for employee satisfaction, for lowering turnover rates, for employee engagement — and that is something that is hugely valuable to accounting firms.”

DEI improves the bottom line, research shows. Companies in the the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams are 25% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the bottom quartile, and companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity outperformed by 36% in profitability, according to McKinsey.

Etienne sees an unexpected silver lining in the crackdown on DEI. In the past, she sensed an aspect of performative activism fueling firms’ DEI efforts. Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, corporate America renewed its commitments to DEI initiatives, such as implementing diverse recruitment practices, increasing pay equity, establishing employee resource groups, and hosting trainings on topics such as unconscious bias and microaggressions. 

But in her work as a consultant, she has found, “Many leaders felt that the demonstration and the evidence of their commitment is the fact that they’re talking to me right now. ‘Yeah, I’ve hired you. How much more committed can I be?'” she said. “So I don’t think there was a deep understanding, or an interest in having a deep understanding, of how DEI is already woven into the ecosystem of an organization. It touches everything. But they didn’t want to do that.”

By removing the social reward of championing DEI, Etienne explained, “We can all stop patting ourselves on the back and putting pretty words on the website and saying, ‘Yay, yay, yay,’ and we can do the work.”

Right now, every conversation about technology seems to revolve around artificial intelligence. However, AI is a broad category — it includes machine learning, robotic process automation, and workflow automation tools, all of which promise efficiency gains for accounting firms.

Despite this, many firm leaders struggle to quantify the value of these technologies. How do you determine whether AI, automation, or any emerging tool is worth the investment? The answer isn’t as complicated as it seems.

It’s less about the technology itself and more about how we value our time. If you understand the value of time within your firm, you can easily assess whether automation delivers a meaningful return on investment.

At Boomer Consulting, we gather and analyze key financial and operational metrics from our member firms, which include many of the Top 50 and Top 100 Firms from around the country. One of the most critical data points? The value of time.

On average, time in most firms is worth about $242 per hour per professional. That means 10 minutes is worth roughly $40, and one hour saved per week translates to $12,584 per year per person.

This is the simplest way to measure ROI for automation tools. If a solution saves even a few minutes per day per person, the financial return is undeniable.

An ROI example

Let’s look at a pretty typical example. Microsoft CoPilot is an AI-powered assistant for Office 365 applications. Its price tag is around $30 per user per month ($360 per year). That may seem like just another software expense. But let’s quantify the value.

As anyone who’s played around with CoPilot can attest, time savings are not hard to achieve. Its efficiency gains come from small but meaningful enhancements in everyday workflows. For example, it can auto-generate and suggest improvements to text in Word. It analyzes data, creates PivotTables and identifies trends in Excel spreadsheets. In Outlook, CoPilot can draft emails, summarize threads, and extract unanswered questions. It creates slides from Word docs and Excel data for your PowerPoint presentations and adjusts formatting. 

How much could you save each day with that kind of help? One hour? Two or three hours?

If CoPilot saves each person in your firm just 10 minutes per day:

• The daily savings per person is $40 (10 minutes at $240/hour)
• The annual savings per person equal $10,400 ($40 x 260 workdays).
• For a 150-person firm, that adds up to $1.56 million in potential savings.
• Less the cost of licenses ($54,000), the net benefit is $1.5 million.

In other words, CoPilot breaks even if it saves just 10 minutes per month. That’s an incredibly low threshold for such a high return.

Applying this mindset to other automation investments

The same analysis applies across audit, tax, and advisory functions.

For example, say you’re evaluating an AI-powered audit tool that costs $50,000 annually and reduces audit time by 10%. If your firm performs 50 audits per year and each audit consumes 200 hours, that’s 1,000 hours saved annually.

At $242 per hour, those 1,000 saved hours are worth $242,000. That’s a profitable investment.

The key to evaluating any automation investment is asking two questions:

1. How much time does it save?
2. How will we reinvest that time into higher-value activities?

If automation allows your team to shift from compliance work to higher-margin advisory services, the ROI extends beyond just cost savings — it directly fuels firm growth.

The biggest risk is not automating at all

Some firm leaders hesitate to invest in AI and automation because it feels expensive upfront. But the real risk isn’t overspending; it’s failing to capitalize on time savings.

Firms that optimize efficiency through automation can increase capacity without increasing headcount, free up time for more strategic, revenue-generating work, reduce burnout and improve employee retention.

Your competitors are exploring how they can leverage AI and automation in their firms. Firms that don’t automate will struggle to remain profitable. The ROI of automation isn’t theoretical — it’s measurable, significant and essential for long-term success.

So the only question is, what’s stopping you?