What Consolidation Cannot Buy

The accounting profession is consolidating at a historic pace. A 103-year-old institution is gone. Here is what is being lost that will not appear in the press release.

A Bedrock Firm Is Gone

After I heard the news recently that Anchin sold to Baker Tilly, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of sadness.

I thought about all of the changes our city has gone through over a century. From the Great Depression to the boom days of the 80s and the financial crisis in 2008, Anchin was there to help guide businesses through all of it. The same week the Knicks win their first championship in half a century, we say goodbye to a bedrock NYC firm.

Anchin, Block and Anchin was founded in 1923. The kind of firm every accountant of my generation grew up understanding to be the model. Partner-owned, locally led, built on relationships that compounded across decades. The accounting profession as we have known it for thirty years is changing rapidly, and I am not sure most of the industry and business community has fully absorbed what that means. Including myself.

The Artistry

What will be lost in these deals is not just headcount or real estate or a brand name. It is the artistry.

Accounting at its best has never been a service business in the way consulting is a service business. It is a craft. Built through an apprenticeship model, colleague to colleague, partner-by-partner, decade-by-decade. The senior who teaches the staff how to put together a cash flow statement. The mentor who teaches a junior associate how to deliver a hard message to a CFO without jeopardizing the relationship. The relationship partner who has been signing the same family’s returns for thirty years and knows which question to ask before the family knows they need to be asked.

Those are not processes. They are not transferable in a deal. They are the accumulated judgment of people who chose to invest in each other over time. That is what firms like Anchin actually were. A living, breathing community where former partners entrusted future generations of partners to carry on something they spent their careers building.

That kind of institution is an extension of people’s lives. It is hard to build. It is easy to underestimate how much it matters until it is gone.

What Doesn’t Transfer

The stability a 103-year-old organization provides will inevitably be tested when it becomes a division of something ten times its size.

According to EY, employee turnover following a merger averages 47% within the first year. Within three years, that number reaches 75%. The partners who built the relationships that made Anchin worth acquiring are not contractually required to stay. Some will retire. Some will leave. Some will stay and discover that operating inside a $3.36 billion national firm is a fundamentally different experience than the one they signed up for.

The industry prices this in. Most accounting firm deal structures include a retention clause: if client retention drops below 90% in the first year, the purchase price is adjusted downward. The buyers know clients leave when the partner they trusted walks out the door. They model it into the spreadsheet and proceed anyway.

The Client Didn’t Get a Vote

When a merger or buyout like this occurs, generational businesses who have been with a firm like Anchin for years will naturally wonder what happens to the relationships they have relied on for decades. Some may feel a sense of loss. Some may feel something closer to betrayal. You will not see that in the press release.

What is being sold in many of these transactions is not just equity. It is trust that was built over years, sometimes decades, with clients who never agreed to be part of the transaction.

A client who has worked with the same partner for twenty years made a choice. They chose a firm. They chose a person. They chose a relationship. That choice assumed a level of continuity that a sale does not guarantee. When partners cash out and the firm they built becomes a division of something much larger, the client does not get a vote. They get a letter. They get a new contact. And they get to decide whether to stay.

I am not questioning the legal right of any firm’s partners to sell. They built something real. They took real risk. They deserve to be compensated for it.

But the profession needs to be more honest about what is actually happening in these transactions. The relationship was the asset. The sale monetizes the value created by that relationship, even though the client had little say in how it evolves afterward. That creates tension around something accounting, more than almost any other profession, depends on: trust, continuity, and stewardship.

The Wave

Baker Tilly acquiring Anchin is not an isolated event. It is a data point in a restructuring that has been accelerating since Covid.

Accounting consolidation has increased fourfold since 2021. In 2025 alone, fewer than 200 private equity investments in accounting firms generated roughly 900 subsequent transactions. That is 7.6 acquisitions triggered for every single direct PE investment. The capital goes in once and the deals keep compounding.

Annual deal volume tells the same story. There were 22 accounting firm transactions in 2023. That number rose to 65 in 2024. It crossed 100 in 2025. January 2026 opened at more than three times the prior year’s monthly average pace.

This is not simply a wave, where there is a peak and a trough. What we are seeing is a rapid restructuring of the accounting industry as it existed in 2020. What existed for the last century is increasingly being reorganized around a different ownership model, a different incentive structure, and potentially a different definition of what it means to be in this profession.

Baker Tilly illustrates the moment. PE-backed, recently the sixth largest accounting firm in the country following its acquisition of Moss Adams, now moving its headquarters to New York City. The Anchin deal is the next move in a strategy being executed with real urgency. PE firms hold investments for three to seven years. The early investors in PE-backed accounting firms are approaching their exit windows. The acquisitions will not slow down. They will accelerate because they have to.

We Have Seen This Before

Before we accept the premise often found in consolidation press releases (that scale automatically creates better outcomes for clients), it is worth looking at another industry that traveled a similar path.

Healthcare consolidation was built on a compelling argument. Scale creates efficiency. Efficiency creates margin. Margin funds better care. The logic was difficult to argue with.

Yet over time, researchers, regulators, and patients began asking a different question: efficient for whom?

A recent Harvard Medical School study found patients at private-equity-owned hospitals experienced higher rates of preventable harm. The lesson is not that accounting and healthcare are the same. They are not. The lesson is that ownership structure matters. Incentives matter.

When the people making acquisition decisions are optimizing for an investment horizon measured in years, while clients are optimizing for relationships measured in decades, tension can emerge between what is best for the owner and what is best for the customer.

Healthcare learned that scale alone is not a strategy. It is certainly not a guarantee of better outcomes.

Accounting would be wise to remember that lesson as consolidation accelerates.

Staying Put

The consolidation wave is real. It is accelerating. There will be firms that build significant businesses within it.

But I do not believe the firms that define this profession ten years from now will be the ones that bought the most.

At Wiss, we have made a deliberate choice to stay independent. Wiss has been here since 1969. Fifty-seven years. We are not yet what Anchin became at 103, but we know what it took to build a firm that lasts that long, and we understand what is at risk of being lost when institutions like that disappear into something larger.

That choice has a cost. The economics of consolidation are not imaginary. The capital available to PE-backed platforms is real. We are watching firms that were our peers a few years ago become subsidiaries of national platforms.

And we are staying put.

Because we believe we have an obligation to the founders of Wiss before us and the clients we serve today. Because we believe the relationship is the product. We want our clients to trust the firm as much as they trust the person who has been serving them. At Wiss those are not two separate things. We are not going to sell that trust to fund a liquidity event.

What we are doing instead is building. Wiss Labs is our investment in the future of this profession: AI tools and new infrastructure that make us sharper, faster, and more valuable to clients. We are deepening relationships by improving performance. We aim to give our colleagues technology that amplifies judgment, not replaces it. We are strengthening the apprenticeship model and building an intelligence layer that contextualizes years of client interactions.

The version of this profession we have all known is going away. But we are not.

The artistry is worth defending. The craft is worth defending.

Clients will ultimately decide which model wins.