Comment by euix

My partner works at one of these big four companies and the way she puts it - they essentially function as outsourced expertise for governments the world over - essentially expert functions have been hollowed out of state governments and into the private sector and thus there is really no expertise within the national government level to handle complex tax and accounting situations and they are instead all outsourced to these firms.

We should really consider the present western world as some sort of marriage of corporatism and government - they are really hand in hand as two sides of the same coin.