Can India have a home-grown mega sized CA firm that can go global and compete with the Big Four firms? It may be in the works. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs are laying down the ground work for this.
“We have made a Committee for Aggregation of CA firms. It is working very effectively on how to frame guidelines for networking, multidisciplinary partnership, international networking, merger and demerger and advertisement. We are working on these five fronts so as to empower Indian firms to become global,” said ICAI President Ranjeet Kumar Agarwal.
In an interaction with BT, Agarwal said ICAI is working on these five fronts to empower Indian CA firms to become global. It is also going to make a presentation before the ministry of corporate affairs on this. “The ministry is also very keen on how Indian CA firms can grow big,” he said.
At present, there are about 96,000 CA firms in India. Of these, 75,000 firms are proprietorships and are small and medium-sized. Another 24,000 firms are partnerships with 2 to 100 partners. Of these, about 400 firms have 10 partners or more.
“We want to leverage and we want to allow them to merge so that they can become bigger. For merger, they need some incentives, policies and tools on which we are working,” said Agarwal, underlining that Indian firms have the capacity to grow big and become global but they need some handholding.
“India has no dearth of talent. A large number of Indian CAs are also working abroad,” he highlighted. Out of a total of 400,000 CAs in the country, about 160,000 are practicing professionals.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had way back in July 2017 in his address at the Chartered Accountants Day said that there are no Indian CA firms in the Big Four and had called for creating four big India accounting firms. At present, the top global accountancy firms include PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG.
