Background
William Welch Deloitte was a brilliant, pioneering 19th-century British accountant who single-handedly founded the original London accounting practice in 1845. He is widely celebrated globally as one of the true, undisputed founding fathers of the modern, professional accounting industry, famously becoming the first independent auditor of a major public railway company.
Role at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited
Deloitte possesses a deep, historic founding legacy, tracing its roots to the dawn of modern corporate accounting during the industrial expansion of 19th-century London and New York. The modern conglomerate is the product of a series of historical mergers, but the foundational name traces back to William Welch Deloitte. In 1845, at the height of the British Railway Mania, Deloitte opened a small accounting office in London. He was a brilliant, meticulous accountant. He achieved historical significance in 1849 when he was appointed as an independent auditor for the Great Western Railway. He was the very first independent accountant ever appointed to audit a public company, establishing the foundational principle of independent corporate oversight. The second foundational pillar was established across the Atlantic in 1890, when Charles Waldo Haskins and Elijah Watt Sells founded Haskins & Sells in New York. They were brilliant American accountants who gained national fame when they were hired by the US Congress to overhaul the chaotic accounting system of the United States Government. In 1893, they also established the precedent of professional American accounting. The third pillar was the firm Touche Ross, founded in 1899 by George Touche in London (and later expanding into the US). In 1989, recognizing the requirement for global scale to serve multinational clients, Deloitte Haskins & Sells executed a historic merger with Touche Ross. This consolidation formed Deloitte & Touche (now simply known as Deloitte), creating a globe-spanning professional services titan built upon the foundational legacy of the very men who invented modern corporate auditing.