Abstract This article focuses on the nature and scope of the activities of the U.S. public accounting firms. While it is not possible to present definitive statistics on the degree of audit penetration of large public accounting firms in the corporate sector, we believe the data contained in this paper are broadly suggestive of the contours of the audit work done for large corporate clients by large U. S. public accounting firms. The data, consisting of information culled from corporate annual reports, may suggest to the incautious reader that a high degree of conceptual precision has been attained. the data contain several statistical weaknesses, most of which inevitably exist in studies of this kind. These weaknesses are brought out at the beginning of the paper in order to emphasize their presence. They encompass (1) the sample, it omits certain industries and is not nearly so large as other usable lists. (2) reliance on other auditors, The appearance of an auditor's opinion in the annual report of a company. (3) the rank-criterion of revenues, while total revenues would seem to be an appropriate criterion and (4) classification of companies into industries, It is exceedingly difficult today to draw lines between industries and to classify particular companies into industries..
Zeff et al. (Sat,) studied this question.