The paper shows KPMG commands almost 30pc of fees generated for audits of so-called public-interest entities (PIE) – a category that includes banks and insurers, stock market-listed PLCs and bond issuers.
That’s well ahead of next-placed fee earner Deloitte.
In 2023, four audit firms; Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers Ireland (PwC), audited approximately 73pc of PIEs and earned approximately 89pc of the related fees.
There are 523 PIEs in Ireland.
Any statutory auditor or audit firm may be appointed as an auditor to a PIE but in practice, that work goes to the handful of big firms and within that, largely to the established ‘Big 4’ of Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC.
Auditors have to inform IAASA the first time they are appointed as an auditor to a PIE so the work is easy for the regulator to track.
At the end of 2023, seven audit firms were auditing 523 PIEs.
The seven is made up of BDO, Deloitte, EY, Grant Thornton, KPMG, Mazars, and PricewaterhouseCoopers Ireland.
While PwC audited more of the important business than any of its rivals and generated 20pc of fees, that payment was less than KPMG or Deloitte which each worked on fewer cases, the report shows.
IAASA said it inspected 31 audits of PIEs across the seven firms active in the market.
In all but two firms’ work, KPMG and PwC, the industry watchdog found improvements were required.
The quality of 77pc of PIE audits were assigned a grade of two or higher, indicating that these audits were of a good standard or required only limited improvements.
In audits by BDO, Deloitte, EY, Grant Thornton and Mazars, the watchdog found work where it assigned a ‘grade 3’, indicating improvements were required, although it identified no ‘grade 4’ cases at any firms which would show significant improvements were required.
The vast majority of the 1,139 audit firms operating in Ireland are not active in the top PIE end of the market.
