A Faux-Rapture Occurred at an H&R Block in Orange County

Inside Public Accounting put out their annual ranking of accounting firms this month and like the Accounting Today list, it is based on revenues so it barely causes a stir.

Not that we don’t appreciate the distraction in the middle of August but the list doesn’t have any surprises and is nearly identical to AT’s. Nevertheless, we’ll present the top 25 firms here for your dissecting enjoyment (previous ranking in brackets):

1. Deloitte [1]
2. Ernst & Young [2]
3. PricewaterhouseCoopers [3]
4. KPMG [4]
5. McGladrey [5] (who is still calling this firm “RSM McGladrey” and “McGladrey & Pullen”? They had cake and punch for crissakes.)

6. Grant Thornton [6]
7. Mayer Hoffman & McCann/CBIZ [8]
8. BDO [7]
9. Crowe Horwath [9]
10. BKD [10]
11. Moss Adams [11]
12. Plante & Moran [12]
13. Clifton Gunderson [14]
14. Baker Tilly Virchow Krause [17]
15. Marcum [20]
16. J.H. Cohn [15]
17. UHY Advisors [16]
18. LarsonAllen [19]
19. Reznick Group [13]
20. Dixon Hughes [18]
21. ParenteBeard [35/36]
22. Rothstein Kass [21]
23. Eide Bailly [22]
24. Eisner [23]
25. WeiserMazars [24]

So then. The top 5 is a snoozer, per usual. You can see that the the firms that experienced a merger or acquisition in the past year are the ones that jumped the most (e.g. BTVK, ParenteBeard, Marcum) with the exception of WeiserMazars, a merger that was an international play as opposed to a domestic one. And since rumored mergers don’t count you don’t see the Eisner Amper effect here. Reznick Group experienced the most significant drop which can’t be explained at this point but we’d love to hear theories.

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