On June 18th, the Audit Committee of General Electric [GE] – a multinational conglomerate company – selected Deloitte & Touche as its independent auditor for the Company’s fiscal year ending December 31, 2021, ending its 111-year tenure with KPMG. According to the 8-K filed on June 22nd, the dismissal will become effective following KPMG’s completion of the Company’s audit for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2020.
As illustrated, GE’s 111-year relationship with KPMG is among a small fraction of S&P 500 companies; tenures lasting more than 100 years account for less than 2% of auditor-client relationships within this market index.
Notably, General Electric is one of only twelve S&P 500 companies having an auditor change in recent years.
Since 2018, there was only one other S&P 500 company that changed auditors after a longer tenured engagement: DuPont de Nemours [DD], which occurred in conjunction with the split of its predecessor – DowDuPont – into three independent, publicly traded companies.
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