The KPMG Files: Thirty Years of Scandals, Secrets and Failures
By William Shannon
For more than a century, KPMG has been one of the world's most influential professional services firms, entrusted with auditing multinational corporations, advising governments, and helping shape the global financial system. Its business is built on one essential commodity: trust.
But over the last thirty years, that trust has been tested repeatedly.
From the Enron era and the U.S. tax shelter prosecutions to the global financial crisis, South Africa's state capture scandal, Britain's audit crisis, and Australia's confidential tax leaks, The KPMG Files traces the defining controversies that have shaped one of the world's most recognizable accounting firms-and, through its story, the evolution of modern auditing itself.
Drawing on court records, regulatory investigations, parliamentary inquiries, public reports, and decades of documented events, William Shannon reconstructs the history behind the headlines. Rather than offering sensational accusations, the book examines what happened, why it happened, how regulators responded, how KPMG responded, and what these events reveal about the growing pressures facing institutions responsible for safeguarding confidence in global markets.
This is more than the history of one company.
It is the story of how corporate governance, auditing, regulation, and public trust have evolved over three turbulent decades.
For readers of The Smartest Guys in the Room, When Genius Failed, Bad Blood, and The Big Short, The KPMG Files offers an accessible, deeply researched exploration of one of the most important-and least understood-professions in modern finance.
In an age where billions of dollars move through markets every second, one question has never mattered more:
Who audits the auditors?
