Just 5.9% of partners out of a total of 20 firms returning the numbers, were from ethnic minorities.

DTE Group and UHY Hacker Young have the best records, with 25% and 19% respectively.

Only two of the Big Four firms revealed the number of partners drawn from ethnic minorities for this year’s survey, with neither Deloitte nor E&Y providing figures. PricewaterhouseCoopers disclosed a figure of 2% and KPMG 4%.

The Commission for Racial Equality this week told Accountancy Age that the numbers were better than other industries, but that the figures ‘could be better’.

The Big Four tend to hire from the country’s top 12 universities, which have much smaller numbers of ethnic minority graduates than other universities, the CRE said.

Statistics from the commission show more than 5,000 complaints from ethnic minorities in the accountancy sector, of which 43% related to employment. Complaints also included workplace bullying, lack of career progression and the inability to secure interviews.

On the surface, the accountancy profession looks like it has improved representation of ethnic minorities among partners – up to 5.9%, compared with 4% three years ago – but the figures are misleading, as they are bolstered by ethnic representation of partners outside the Big Four.

For the industry as a whole, this means that one in 15 partners may be of an ethnic minority – which compares well to the 7.9% of ethnic minorities currently living and working in the UK.

A spokeswoman for the CRE said the discrepancy lay in the fact that the Big Four aren’t representative while smaller firms are often exclusively Asian. ‘Their higher average pulls up the rest of the Top 50,’ she said.