On August 8, 2026, reporters from The New York Times encountered a bizarre situation for an American company with about 7,500 employees and 150 million customers across 100 countries annually.
Jesse Drucker reported that he had been in Malta, in the Mediterranean archipelago.
He noted, "Take the stairs to the second floor of an old brewery on the Mediterranean archipelago of Malta and buzz yourself in to a tiny office hidden behind a heavy metal door.
The air smells of hops, but this place isn’t just brewing beer: It’s the headquarters for a convoluted strategy that the world’s biggest corporations use to dodge billions of dollars in U.S. income taxes."
Crocs Has a Trick for Dodging Taxes: a Tiny Office in Malta
About one-quarter of the people working in KPMG UK’s audit practice are based offshore, according to the firm’s latest transparency report.
Two auditors at Big Four firms told the FT they had felt there was an increasing reliance on offshore teams and raised concerns about the quality of the work those teams were able to produce.
The Big 4 accounting firms—Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG — and KPMG is Crocs's accountant.
"A KPMG presentation reviewed by The New York Times laid out a Byzantine arrangement for prospective clients to slash their tax bills by arbitraging U.S. and Maltese rules."
| Accounting Network | United States | United Kingdom | European Union (Est. Regional) | Total Global Staff |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deloitte | ~181,500 | ~26,900 | ~95,000 | 473,100 |
| PwC | ~78,000 | ~25,000 | ~87,000 | ~364,000 |
| EY | ~62,000 | ~21,000 | ~85,000 | ~395,000 |
| KPMG | ~47,500 | ~16,700 | ~76,000 | ~275,000 |
- Assurance / Audit: The mandatory verification and signing off of public/private company financial statements.
- Advisory / Consulting: Strategy, technology transformations, M&A management, and operations implementation.
- Tax & Legal Services: Multi-jurisdictional tax compliance, corporate tax structuring, and cross-border statutory legal services.
- Transaction / Risk Advisory: Forensic accounting, restructuring, financial due diligence, cyber risk governance, and regulatory compliance.
- Deloitte: Advisory/Consulting (62%) | Audit & Assurance (20%) | Tax & Legal (18%)
- PwC: Audit & Assurance (39%) | Advisory/Consulting (37%) | Tax & Legal (24%)
- EY: Assurance (35%) | Advisory (27%) | Tax (25%) | Strategy & Transactions (13%)
- KPMG: Advisory (43%) | Audit & Assurance (36%) | Tax & Legal (21%) [1]
- 1928 Profile: Operating globally under its historic British and American partnership. It was widely considered the most prestigious firm of the era.
- 1928 Profile: Founded in Chicago in 1913, the firm took the name Arthur Andersen & Co. in 1918. It grew rapidly in the 1920s by focusing heavily on utility companies.
- 1928 Profile: Formed by the early 20th-century alliance of British and American accountants. It was aggressively expanding its footprint across North America in the 1920s.
- Evolution: Merged with Klynveld Main Goerdeler (KMG) in 1987 to form KPMG.
The Big Four accounting firms have admitted hundreds of violations of regulations designed to protect the independence of their audit work, following the introduction of new disclosure rules in the US.
The admissions come as the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board urges companies and investors to pay greater attention to the findings of its annual inspections of audit firms, the latest round of which are expected to be released in the coming weeks.
US regulators require audit firm staff and their immediate family to make thorough financial disclosures, for example of their investments, and they ban employment and financial relationships with audit clients that could impair the firm’s independence.
Tap the link in our bio for more details on the violations.
The UK’s accounting regulator has fined EY £1.2mn for the Big Four firm’s audit of collapsed online furniture retailer Made.com.The UK’s accounting regulator has fined EY £1.2mn for the Big Four firm’s audit of collapsed online furniture retailer Made.com.
The fine leaves EY, where partners were paid an average of £787,000 last year, with four open investigations into its audit work, including on its audit of energy group Shell and the Post Office.
