As genuine as your question is, there are no good answers. The way we ended up with a Big Four is that the Fifth member of the Big Five (Arthur Andersen) audited Enron, essentially telling everybody that it wasn't an enormous fraud, but it was. All the senior people at AA avoided jail but the audit firm was so obviously untrustworthy it folded. But that doesn't mean the other Four are fine, it just means the "Too Big To Fail" problem is far worse for audit firms than for banking. If we took down one of the Big Four it would probably tank the whole world economy, and they know that, which is Not Good.

> If we took down one of the Big Four it would probably tank the whole world economy

No it wouldn’t.

The "too big to fail" argument is what saved KPMG in South Africa:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kpmg-safrica-exclusive/ex...

Many privacy activists believe that the best proof of a no-logging assertion is for a court to order a provider to turn over logs and for the company to be unable to do so.

Isn't the court system mostly powered by the threat of serious jail time if you're found to be lying, and penalties for your lawyers, too?

If you say "We don't have those logs," and you swear to it and a lawyer puts their name on the filing, it's not like Judge Alsup will start pentesting your company to find the one employee who accidentally has Dropbox pointed at an sftp mount of some production server.

Signal did a version of that with the help of aclu.

And to prove that they are unable to do so, would they need to get audited?