The Big Four have become a shadow of their former selves. They have become so risk averse that their advice is already incredibly generic and non-actionable.

I think their audit work is in a downwards spiral. Audit has become so competitive that they are struggling to find ways to make it cheaper. They have become slaves to reducing the hours booked, and the rate of those hours. To do this they substitute less experienced people all the time. You used to be able to chat with your partner about an issue you have coming up, now you get their assistant if you are lucky. By chasing 'efficiency' they have lost their value-add. Now the first time the partner has looked at your file is right before the clearance meeting, and they spot issues that should have been picked up earlier and tested on the day you should be signing. So you end up doing it all again. I'm trying to coin a term for the inneficiency caused by chasing efficiency.

I worked at a top 5 hedge fund in the early 2000s. They had a large team of E&Y auditors onsite at all times that I worked somewhat closely with.

Some things stuck out at me: - They were all in their early 20s. - They were all incredibly checked out. Honestly they still seem like an outlier to me decades later. - They partied hard. Yes, with drugs. - Most of them were in rotating intimate relationships with each other and unusually open about it. Office scuttlebutt was literally "who is fucking who this week". - They seemed busy for maybe two or three weeks out of the entire year and then it was long stretches of Minesweeper/Solitaire.

I filed this away in my head as "provides no value" and that was decades ago. If the industry itself is worse off today I can't imagine how much worse it actually is from my experience.

> I'm trying to coin a term for the inneficiency caused by chasing efficiency.

"don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" ?

...>term for the inneficiency caused by chasing efficiency.

Penny wise, pound foolish? Measure twice cut once?