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Those of you who follow our blog will likely recall that in the past two Aprils, we have published an article that takes a look at how many private funds decided to raise something of a red flag in the previous year; namely, changing auditor.

We’re not in the business of disappointing our followers, so here we are with this year’s update!

Now that the end of the first quarter is in the books and all private funds will have filed their Form ADV for the prior year, we can crunch the numbers. And the ‘glass half full’ perspective is that there has been an improvement from last year.

In 2024 (specifically, Form ADVs filed in 2025), the category with the fewest auditor changes (as a percentage of the overall category) was venture capital, where only 1.9% of funds changed provider. But in the ‘other’ category, 4.7% of them did.

This year, the picture is a little different. Venture fell to 1.2% and Other to 2.7% and there were also falls in hedge funds and private equity (Figure 1 below). 

Figure 1: Private Funds That Changed Auditor in 2024 and 2025, by Type

Source: 9AT

*Securitized Asset Funds and Liquidity Funds are excluded due to lack of statistical significance

The reasons why the numbers improved from last year are, admittedly, difficult to pin down with any certainty. But educated guesses would suggest that fund managers tend to stick to what they know in times of uncertainty and 2025 was indeed uncertain, both geopolitically and from a macroeconomic perspective.  

Changing auditor does not necessarily have to be the red flag that it seems like on the surface – often the manager might change due to price, or a perceived better service offered by a different provider.

And there has been – is still – a human capital challenge in the audit industry more broadly which has had a secondary impact of making the larger firms more selective in terms of which clients they onboard.

Still, some change did happen, of course, and hidden among the data are some interesting titbits, as can be seen in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: US Private Fund Auditor Changes, by Replacement Auditor, 2025 

Source: 9AT

In 2024, across the five largest categories of funds available for selection on Form ADV, non-Big Four audit firms featured nine times out of 25. This past year, that number rose to 13, more than half.

The change is clearly most pronounced in venture capital, where only one of the Big Four featured in the top five of the competitor replacement lists. And that the Big Four hold the top spots in the overall rankings is influenced heavily by the private equity category, which is the only sub-category in which all four firms feature; three times as many PE funds changed auditor last year than venture capital funds, so the overall picture becomes a little distorted.

There is a long tail in the audit market. Some 56 firms replaced an incumbent in the hedge fund space last year; 41 did so in the Other category, 62 in private equity, 37 in real estate and 39 in venture.

That means plenty of choice for private fund managers who perhaps delayed making a change in 2025 due to the aforementioned market uncertainty.

We can’t end our annual auditor missive without looking at the new funds that were filed on this year’s Form ADV. It’s hard to knock out the big four when it comes to new funds – they take most of the top four spots in most of the categories.  

But what’s interesting is to look at who takes up spots 5-10, as shown in Figure 3 below. 

Figure 3: New Private Fund Auditor Hires in 2025, Places 5-10, ordered by fund count

Source: 9AT 

While there is one category where one of the big four has been displaced by the top four spots – Frank Rimerman taking first place in venture capital – there seems to be something of a consistency in the remainder of the top 10, with RSM and BDO featuring in all categories and Grant Thornton, EisnerAmper, and Baker Tilly each featuring in four categories.  

Without going into detail, it’s worth noting that these rankings are done by fund count; ordering it by Total GAV serviced can (and does!) change the ranking and the overall picture. It’s also worth noting that these take into account funds from firms that filed ADVs in the first quarter of this year. While that represents ~80% of alternative fund advisers, the other ~20% that will file throughout the remainder of the year may change these rankings.  

The geopolitical landscape is, let’s say, in the news at the moment. More so than ever, indeed. And while there tends to be a risk-off approach to investing during times of market dislocation, this mentality might be seeping into vendor selection as well.

Whether the percentage of funds that change auditor this year increases or whether they remain in ‘let’s not rock the boat’ mode remains to be seen but what is certain – as certain as can be, of course – is that here at 9AT, we’ll be watching, and we’ll do this again next April, at least! 

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