Deloitte and its member firms have many birthdays and anniversaries, but the organization’s true origin was in the opening of William Welch Deloitte’s office in London on April 23, 1845.

In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln chose Elijah Sells—father of Elijah W. Sells, an important figure in Deloitte’s history—to be third auditor of the Treasury of the United States. The Lincoln Proclamation, which records Lincoln’s decision for posterity, has become a treasured part of Deloitte’s history.

For four decades, founder William Welch Deloitte made his home in Southall, a town 40 miles west of his office in central London. He built strong ties to the local community, and helped fund the construction of his community church in 1890. “His works do follow him” are the iconic words written in Deloitte’s honor on a commemorative plaque outside of Holy Trinity Church today.

Deloitte’s generosity extended further when, in 1897, he donated the land and funds to create homes for the poor in Southall. Deloitte’s Almshouses, which were built during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, remain a living testament to Deloitte’s charitable spirit.

Today, Southall is a diverse, largely South Asian community known as Little India, with railway station signs in both English and Gurmukhi. The church and Almshouses are still standing today, a persistent reminder of Deloitte’s commitment to his community.

When it was introduced in 2003, the Green Dot was restricted to punctuating Deloitte’s new wordmark logo. But in 2009, it found greater prominence as part of an advertising campaign in which the Dot showed the way forward: as a doorknob opening onto a new opportunity, a sun emerging from behind a cloud, and other roles.

Deloitte University expanded to Asia in 2016 when it opened its fifth campus, in Singapore.

Akintola Williams, the first black African to qualify as a British Chartered Accountant.

Deloitte was the first of the Big Four to admit women to partnership in the Middle East.

Article on the launch of Tohmatsu, Awoki & Co.

S.B. Billimoria, the founder of a Deloitte India legacy firm, was the most decorated Indian accountant of his generation. In 1928, he became the first and only Indian accountant to be knighted.

By 1847, after two years in business, Deloitte had a staff of 10, working between nine and 17 hours a day.

“Mr. Deloitte, was one of the first, if not the very first, to introduce the professional element into the practice of Accountancy in London.” John Gane, Deloitte clerk, 1857-1870.

Deloitte LLP’s Emerging Leaders Development Program (ELDP) prepares diverse, high-performing managers for the next stage in their careers. In addition to an intensive curriculum and a suite of digital self-assessment tools, ELDP pairs each participant with a senior mentor who advises the participant for at least two years.

Deloitte University trained more than 90,500 Deloitte professionals in more than 2,000 programs in 2018, preparing those professionals for the next step in their careers.

“Europeans and natives alike are integral parts of our South African nation—the better we all understand one another, the greater is the hope for a peaceful and prosperous South Africa. The future progress of South Africa is inseparably bound up with the economic prosperity of all sections of our South African population.” Howard Pim, founder, Howard Pim & Hardy, 1905.

Sharon Allen was the first woman to lead a Big Four accounting firm’s board, serving as Deloitte US chairman from 2003 to 2011.

GLOBE, Deloitte UK’s employee resource group for LGBTQ employees, received a 2016 Deloitte Impact Award in recognition of its work on behalf of employees.

Jennie Palen, a principal at Haskins & Sells and the first woman to head a department at a major accounting firm, was originally offered a CPA position due to a shortage of male auditors after World War I.

In 1857, during his investigation into the Great Northern Railway fraud, Deloitte took a partner, Thomas Greenwood, who had worked for another one of Deloitte’s early clients, Great Western Railway.

When Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co. opened an office in St. Petersburg in 1913, Russian law banned the use of a deceased partner’s name in a firm’s name. The Russian offices of Deloitte thus operated under the name Plender, Griffiths, Wyatt & Co. until they were forced to close after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Deloitte Nigeria founder Akintola Williams is the only surviving signatory to the original Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) from its founding in September 15, 1960.

Deloitte was one of the first international accounting firms to set up a representative office in Beijing, in 1984, and was the first to set up a cooperative joint venture there nine years later.

Shortly after its formation in 1968, Tohmatsu, Awoki & Co. became an international force. By the time the firm became a member of Touche Ross International in 1975, the firm had over 50 Japanese clients in New York alone.

Deloitte’s predecessor firm in Norway, the Bergens Revisionsinstitut, called itself the “tillitsselskapet”— “the company of trust”.

WEDIT, Deloitte’s German member firm at the time, opened four offices in the former East Germany in 1990, just one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the year that East and West Germany unified.

Philip Simpson Ross opened his accounting practice—one of the forerunners of Touche Ross—in Montréal in 1858, nine years before Canadian unification.

The three firms that joined forces in 1974 to create Touche Ross & Co. in Australia were all founded in the early 1880s, and one had roots that extended as far back as 1862.

Haskins & Sells unveiled its revolutionary audit software, AUDITAPE, at the annual AICPA meeting in 1967. More than 1,000 people were trained in its use, and over 1,000 tapes were created and used across six continents.

In December 1928, Haskins & Sells’ New York office used fax technology for the first time, sending a working paper from New York to the firm’s Los Angeles office. The transmission took 90 minutes.

“The development of Auditape by Haskins & Sells underscores our Firm’s belief that in order to meet the challenge of an expanding tomorrow we must be willing to pioneer in exploring the power of an idea. . . . Without this spirit, the moon would still be a distant satellite—and not a suburb of the world.” Roy Lampe, business and industrial writer, Haskins & Sells, 1970.

Tim Haselwood, Derrick Paterson, Ken Purchase and Bill Martin of Touche Ross with the office’s new portable microcomputer in 1983.

Haskins & Sells’ 1898 audit report for the Reading Railroad is potentially the earliest known report by a certified public accounting firm.

In 1893, Elijah W. Sells teamed up with Charles Waldo Haskins to revise the accounting system of the U.S. government. The 53rd Congress recognized Sells’ efforts through an Act of Congress.

Technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are helping spur massive growth for Deloitte. Deloitte Omnia, a cloud-based AI platform, helped drive more than US $1 billion in global investments from 2013 to 2018 in the Audit & Assurance practice area.

Deloitte’s dedicated Apple practice, the first of its kind, has about 5,000 strategic advisors, more than 1% of Deloitte’s total workforce, who help clients maximize their use of the company’s ecosystem.

Haskins & Sells overhauled Chicago’s accounting systems in 1901, including an audit of its records from 1871 through 1891. The reforms helped the city save $70,000 per year.

Touche Ross’ consulting business coordinated the judging of the more than 75,000 entries in the 1963 Pillsbury Grand National Bake-Off.

Ed Kangas of Touche Ross, Iwao Tomita of Tohmatsu, and Michael Cook of Deloitte at the merger of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

Elijah Watt Sells of Deloitte legacy firm Haskins & Sells refused to allow auditors to serve as directors on clients’ boards, a policy that inspired the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ own independence rule, adopted in 1962.

When Suheil Saba, son of Saba & Co. founder Fuad Saba, and two Baghdad employees were sent to Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar in 1949, they spent years living and working out of a tent in searing temperatures of up to 50°C (122°F).

In the 1950s, Saba & Co. founder Fuad Saba’s son, Suheil, drove the entire 1,069-mile length of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline in a pickup truck to execute payroll and set up systems and controls at all stations.

“The auditor’s profession was hardly known [in the 1920s] in the Arab world. . . . I did persevere, like any pioneer, with the result that in each year the practice grew within the framework of true professional principles . . . independence, professional knowledge and integrity.” Fuad Saba, founder of Saba & Co., 1971.

Saba & Co. and Touche Ross celebrate their 1978 agreement with a handshake between Russell Palmer, managing partner at Touche Ross, and Suheil Saba, managing partner of Saba & Co.

Bankruptcy cases remained important to William Welch Deloitte even after he made a name for himself as a railway auditor, with at least one clerk visiting Newgate Prison to interview a client.

You might not think a Formula 1 auto racing team has much to offer clients outside of the track, but Deloitte’s UK team has worked with McLaren Applied Technologies to bring cutting-edge sensor, simulation, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to bear on data-driven businesses.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Touche Ross’ computer consulting business helped restructure state welfare, highway safety and driver’s license systems in the U.S..

Haskins & Sells’ early clients included Vassar College as well as Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. The latter prompted the firm to open its London office in 1901.

When William Welch Deloitte founded Deloitte & Co. in 1845, railroad and steam technologies had already greatly transformed England. Deloitte’s clients, such as the Great Western Railway and Great Eastern Steamship company, led the way in the technologies of the second industrial revolution: electricity and telephone.

“Those early years of strenuous struggles . . . as an auditor which bordered in those days very much on the lines of a speculative adventure . . . sowed the seeds of success and prosperity which has been yielding a bounteous crop in later years.” Address by the partners and staff of Deloitte legacy firm S.B. Billimoria & Co. to Shapoorjee Bomanji Billimoria on his knighthood, 1928.

“A profession can exist only so long as it has a social and economic utility. . . . If the profit motive becomes predominant and service motive goes into the background, the profession will deteriorate and in course of time even cease to exist.” Chinubhai C. Chokshi, founder of Deloitte legacy firm C.C. Chokshi & Co., 1965.

In the 1980s, Touche Ross’ Computer Systems Consulting business counted all 50 US states as clients, as well as the governments of Canada and New Zealand.

Haskins & Sells’ first official client was the US Post Office Department, which engaged the legacy Deloitte firm to reform the nation’s money order system.

Haskins & Sells was instrumental in the creation of the peer review system for US accounting practices, with the firm’s Gordon Murray serving as chairman of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants committee that studied the issue, and Haldon Robinson leading the first review team.

Howard Pim, founder of Deloitte legacy firm Pim Goldby, helped establish the Institute of Race Relations in 1929 and served as its treasurer. A lifelong Quaker, Pim devoted much of his life to searching for solutions to South Africa’s racial problems and was dedicated to promoting education for blacks in South Africa. A township in Johannesburg is named after Pim.

Elijah W. Sells approached world peace with the mindset of an accountant. In painstaking detail, he broke down the logistics of creating a military for a proposed world peace tribunal in 1915.

WorldClass donated US$16 million toward empowering people through education in 2018 and had an impact on 1.45 million people in 53 countries.

“I find it of utmost importance to work, live and set goals in the global context rather than within the confines of one nation.” Iwao Tomita, founder of Tohmatsu, Awoki, & Co., 2011.

“Pim’s views on the role of an auditor would find much acclaim in the modern world. . . . He believed firmly that every man had a bounden duty to serve his community and society at large, and became actively involved in countless activities to improve and enrich the lives of individuals and groups within it.” Hendrina Westoll, Of Ledgers and Legends: The Story of Deloitte South Africa.

As part of WorldClass, Deloitte collaborates with the Canadian nonprofit Junior Achievement to help students create real-life businesses and guide them through their entire life cycle. One student business earned $3,530 over its first five months.

Deloitte’s New York office worked with the Commission for Relief in Belgium during World War I. The commission’s chairman, future U.S. President Herbert Hoover, had an office in the same building as Deloitte’s London headquarters and would often visit the firm’s leader, Sir William Plender.

A client developing the Auckland Park suburb of Johannesburg in the late 19th century named two streets “Lothbury Road” and “Finsbury Avenue,” in honor of Deloitte’s former offices in London.

In addition to supporting the construction of Holy Trinity Church in Southall, William Welch Deloitte donated the church organ.

Both Haskins & Sells and Touche, Niven & Co. were located at the Johnston Building at 30 Broad Street in New York in the early 1900s. The building was demolished in 1931.

The Edge in Amsterdam is the greenest building in the world, with nearly 30,000 sensors connecting to a mobile app used by the 2,500 Deloitte employees who are based there and share just 1,000 desks, encouraging collaboration and interaction.

Deloitte Greenhouses are cutting-edge workspaces designed to tackle clients’ most complex problems.

The Deloitte name is French: William Welch Deloitte’s grandfather, Count Jean Onuphre Noailles de Loitte, was a courtier to King Louis XVI of France who fled to England during the French Revolution. He settled in Hull and Anglicized his name to John Onuphre Christmas Deloitte.

Until 1970, only a US citizen could take the test to become a CPA in the United States. When the requirement was relaxed, Takeshi Yamaguchi of Tohmatsu New York took the test and became the first Japanese citizen to become a licensed CPA in the United States.

Until 1970, only a US citizen could take the test to become a CPA in the United States. When the requirement was relaxed, Takeshi Yamaguchi of Tohmatsu New York took the test and became the first Japanese citizen to become a licensed CPA in the United States.