Booting the Big 4 Tired of sky-high fees and skimpy service? Smaller audit firms can give you the personalized and professional attention you're seeking.

Conventional wisdom dictates that if your company is public oryou have designs on the public markets, the Big Four seal ofapproval is a must-have. Heeding that logic, for decades,entrepreneurs have been twisting themselves into pretzels trying toget onto the client list of one of the top accounting firms,eagerly trading personalized attention and service for alleged WallStreet cred.

These days, it hardly seems worth the trade-off. For one thing,fee hikes at the Big Four have made the sacrifice difficult tojustify. "They've doubled their workloads and are making aton of money off of Section 404, [the Sarbanes-Oxley requirementthat companies set up internal controls for financial reporting andthen assess their effectiveness]," says Colleen SaytherCunningham, president and CEO of Financial Executives International, a FlorhamPark, New Jersey, professional association for senior-levelcorporate financial executives. FEI left a Big Four firm in 2004after being presented with a 55 percent audit fee increase. For anonprofit, she says, the hike was prohibitive, so they went with aregional firm instead. "It was a good thing for us," shesays. "We're saving money, and we're getting ashigh-quality an audit, if not higher, as we had before."

The scandals of the past few years have indeed cast doubt on theBig Four stamp as a guarantee of quality. "[The] ArthurAndersen [scandal] was a huge wake-up call," says Debra Jeter,an associate professor of financial accounting at VanderbiltUniversity's MBA program in Nashville, Tennessee.