The European Commission’s plan to break up the four biggest accountants would also oblige them to rename large chunks of their businesses, it emerged yesterday.

Giving further detail of reforms to the profession, Brussels said the changes would force PwC, Deloitte, Ernst Young and KPMG to carry out a partial rebranding as well as a restructuring.

The commission wants the “Big Four” networks to split their audit and consulting businesses in the EU to avoid conflicts of interest following their failure to warn investors of the banking crisis.

The reforms aim to achieve this within the next three to five years by using a system of thresholds to determine whether an accounting firm is too big to remain integrated.

– (Financial Times)