EY’s global leadership will ask its partners to vote on plans to split the firm into separate auditing and consulting businesses, which would bring multimillion-dollar paydays for many of the firm’s 13,000 partners.

In what could be the biggest shake up in the accounting professional in decades, EY is preparing a move that is expected to be followed by big four consulting rivals – Deloitte, KPMG and PwC.

Operations are being split in order to get around global regulatory rules that currently stop the firms from providing non-audit services to audit clients.

EY’s global executive committee says Project Everest - its code name for the split plan -  will be provided in coming months. 

A country-by-country vote is expected to be held during December and January.

Any actual separation will not happen until the end of 2023 at the earliest.

“The global executive have been looking at this opportunity since November 2021 ... we have a very strong culture that we are very confident of that will continue on in the separated businesses, as we call them at the moment ‘AssureCo’ and ‘NewCo’,” says Patrick Winter, EY Asia-Pacific area managing partner.

Under the new regime, EY auditors will be able to tender for work from clients that they currently provide consulting services to, while EY consultants will no longer have regulatory concerns about the conflict that arises from the firm providing non-audit work to audit clients.

“It’s going to provide a greater choice for our clients, whether it’s from an assurance perspective, or it’s a consulting perspective ... for both AssureCo and NewCo there is a huge growth opportunity and upside growth opportunity in both businesses and this is on now unleashed because of the separation,” Mr Winter said.