Although EY’s 13,000 partners have yet to vote on the audit/consulting split, the firm continues to march ever onward toward separation, announcing in December that Global Chairman and CEO Carmine Di Sibio would head up consulting and US chair Julie Boland will oversee audit. And a few days ago Financial Times reported that EY has set aside $2.5 billion for a freshly-liberated consulting business to go on an “acquisition spree” that has up until now been prevented by conflicts of interest with audit.
Now we have learned that EY has a consulting CFO all picked out and ready to go. Reports Wall Street Journal:
Ernst & Young recruited Jamie Miller, the departing chief financial officer of Cargill Inc., to lead the finances of its consulting arm, which the Big Four accounting firm is spinning off.
EY on Tuesday said Ms. Miller would serve as its global chief financial officer and eventually as CFO of the consulting division that is set to be hived off as a stand-alone, publicly traded entity, leaving behind a business focused on audits. EY executives devised the separation more than a year ago as regulators increase their scrutiny of potential conflicts of interest in the audit profession.
Cargill announced on Monday that Ms. Miller will step down as Chief Financial Officer “to accept an opportunity outside the company,” Friday will be her last day. The press release says very little else about her and focuses instead of the company’s acting CFO who will be replacing her.
Miller spent 15 years at PwC according to LinkedIn, joining in 1990 and leaving briefly in 2003 to serve as Vice President, Controller, and Chief Accounting Officer for Genworth Financial before returning in 2005 to put in another two years.
The split vote was supposed to take place late last year, EY continues to hold off as it hammers out the fine details. For now, the vote is supposed to take place at the end of this quarter.
EY Hires Cargill CFO to Manage Finances of Consulting Spinoff [Wall Street Journal]
