A growing shortage of qualified accountants in the United States is pushing a wave of U.S.-based accounting and auditing firms to expand their operations in India, mirroring the IT outsourcing boom of the 1990s. Mid-sized firms such as RSM US, Moss Adams, CohnReznick (backed by Apax Partners), and Sikich (backed by Bain Capital) are rapidly scaling their India workforce to bridge widening gaps in their domestic talent pipelines.
According to data from the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), nearly half of its members are over the age of 50, and fewer students are opting to major in accounting, partly due to perceptions of the field as tedious, underpaid, and lacking the appeal of tech or finance. The National Talent Advisory Group, commissioned by the AICPA, confirmed a worsening shortage, with businesses like Mattel reporting delays in annual filings as a result.
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RSM US told that it plans to more than double its India team to 5,000 employees by 2027, while Sikich is actively recruiting accountants and tech talent to support both auditing functions and AI-based service delivery models. “It’s not just about replacing talent one-to-one,” said Bobby Achettu, principal at Sikich. “It’s about transforming how services are delivered using both Indian professionals and advanced technology.”
India Emerges as Global Accounting Hub Amid Rising Student Demand
The growing recruitment wave has had a knock-on effect in India’s higher education landscape. According to Biju Toms, Director at Christ University in Bengaluru, demand for specialised programs such as the Bachelor of Commerce (International Finance) has surged dramatically, with 3,000 applications for just 120 seats in the most recent cycle.
“First it was the Big Four, now it’s the mid-sized firms,” said Toms, referencing a shift where companies like EisnerAmper and BDO are now directly hiring from Indian campuses and even sponsoring CPA certification courses for students. With cost arbitrage, industry-readiness, and access to a massive pool of English-speaking finance professionals, India is emerging as the new frontier for global accounting outsourcing—replicating the evolution that saw engineering and tech roles move to India in the 2000s.
Market intelligence firm UnearthInsight estimates that Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC collectively employ 140,000 to 160,000 professionals in their India-based Global Capability Centres (GCCs) as of 2024. While the Big Four declined to comment, their India presence remains a dominant force in the evolving professional services landscape.
Automation and Aging Workforce Drive Urgency for Transformation
The accounting profession in the U.S. is also under structural pressure from technological disruption, with automation and AI displacing many entry-level tasks and prompting firms to reconfigure their service delivery models. AICPA research and independent academic studies have pointed to the field’s declining popularity among young graduates, a trend exacerbated by the requirement for a fifth year of university education for CPA licensing in many states.
Rebecca Hann, associate dean at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, emphasized the field’s “uncertain future” and the need to rethink talent pipelines. “Fewer students are majoring in accounting because it seems less exciting than tech, and the future of the profession seems ambiguous with automation,” she said.
In contrast, India’s combination of education infrastructure, wage competitiveness, and flexible talent pool is positioning it as a long-term solution to the West’s accounting labor shortage. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, accounting and auditing jobs in the U.S. are expected to grow 6% between 2023 and 2033, outpacing the national average for all occupations.
As companies turn increasingly to India not just for cost efficiency, but also for strategic innovation in service delivery, the nation may soon become the global nerve center for accounting and audit services, much like it did for technology and software two decades ago.