PwC Scales Back African Presence

There’s no place like home for the Big Four accounting firms.

After deeming the markets either too small, risky, or unprofitable, PricewaterhouseCoopers last month severed ties with member firms in more than a dozen sub-Saharan African nations, according to a Financial Times report. It’s just the latest sign of the Big Four accounting firms’ growing skepticism toward maintaining a global presence.

Out of Africa

Maintaining a sterling reputation as a provider of expert tax, audit, and other professional services in just about every major market in the world turns out to be kind of hard. Last month, Reuters reported that PwC has been attempting to mend ties with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, a major client, after being barred from new consulting project contracts until February 2026 (the reason for PIF’s stonewalling is still unclear). Last year, PwC got slapped with a $62 million fine and a six-month suspension in China after the nation’s securities regulators found the firm “turned a blind eye” and “even condoned” fraud by real estate developer Evergrande. 

This latest exodus from Africa, meanwhile, comes a couple of years after banks audited by PwC were entwined in corruption scandals uncovered by the so-called Congo Hold-Up series of investigative reports. According to sources who spoke to the FT, the scandal was enough to prompt a more risk-averse attitude to operating in the region, which ultimately prompted exits from Congo, Cameroon, Madagascar, Senegal, and other countries in March.

PwC isn’t the only firm rethinking its global strategy, either:

• After merging its UK and Swiss operations last year, KPMG is starting to consolidate even further, the FT reported in March. The firm is currently in the midst of a plan to reduce its more than 100 global offices down to just 30 or 40 units, with its 13 African offices to be combined into one single unit.
• Ernst & Young, apparently, is feeling the same pressures. In March, the firm announced a major restructuring of its global operations that would turn its 18 serviced regions into 10 “super regions” as part of a broader cost-cutting operation.

Who, What, Where, When and EY: Rest assured, Africa is far from the only region where corruption cases have made the auditing business risky. On Wednesday, the British government opened an investigation into EY over its audits of the scandal-plagued Post Office. For a controversy refresher: A software glitch at the state-owned post office caused hundreds of self-employed workers over the course of more than a decade to be falsely prosecuted and sometimes convicted of false accounting, theft, and fraud — exactly the type of thing a good audit is supposed to catch. We’ll call this government probe a proper post (office) mortem.