In recent weeks we have reported the rumour that Big4 accounting firms PwC and Deloitte are being crippled by a reported flood of employee departures. These departures, we speculated, are a result of the harsh working conditions these employees have confronted over the last 18 months.
And if the following comments of our anonymous KPMG spy are to be believed, the loss of valued workers might be an issue currently confronting all Big4 firms:
PwC have some sort of non-monetary award thing. Deloitte are reallocating their resources to make up for staff shortages. KPMG Advisory… is doing nothing to stop the haemorrhaging of employees. The market is picking up, and people are not satisfied with the way they’ve been treated over the past 18 months. They are not satisfied with the leadership, pay and the lack of recognition of work, and morale is at an all time low. The cream of the Advisory crop has already been reaped by Macquarie Group, and they can’t find replacement employees in some areas. The ones who are left try and pick up the slack, but this is not recognised, not even a word of ‘thanks’. There is a severe staff shortage, particularly amongst junior levels. Attempts to communicate the morale issues to the Partners have failed. They seem to live in an ivory tower, nicely protected by the ladder climbers who convince them that nothing is wrong.
Meanwhile, in a further update to our report on the major loss of workers from Deloitte’s tax group in Sydney, came the following scathing comments from an anonymous Deloitte spy:
As an ex-Deloitte tax employee i also cannot reiterate how accurate this article is. Staff morale was always at an all time low – but probaby the partners were too far high up the feeding chain to ever bother tilting their heads down to see how
the fellow plebs down below were doing.
where is number 7?!?!?The biggest joke was turning up to work everyday having to literally go around begging for work to do. And the best bit, when you didn’t find any (because, obviously, there wasn’t anything on), you’d be reprimanded for not doing anything or not tryin hard enough, despite having bugged every single other employee to help them out on any tasks… so desparate, sometimes you’d end up doing menial admin tasks given to you by the PA’s who surprising had more work going on than anybody else.
Instead of sourcing more clients and projects, certain partners were always MIA. For eg, the “from 3pm ill be at the gym and wont be coming back” partner is never there when you need him to sign an urgent ITR that needs to be lodged. My favourite partner, is the one who doesn’t even know who works for his tax group when one day he asked me “who are you” and i answered him “i’ve been sitting right outside your office for the year”, obviously unnoticed, unseen and not even respected as an employee.
Another certain partner enjoys being cruel and unforgiving to the unknowing. When HR sells to you, there is direct contact and working experience with senior management (partners), im sure they dont mean one to one coaching whereby the partner drills you for not knowing the legislation off by heart. But his all time favourite question is to drill you on your credentials, in particular, if you went to uni or studied a degree, because in his opinion – if we studied at uni, surely we must know all the tax rules back to front from the tip of our tongues.
Another classic, is this particular newly appointed partner who has an interesting method of cost cutting and budgetting by asking low charging analysts to complete client work for him, but witholds the billing code from you. When you make enquiries for it and finally get your hands on it 2 weeks down the track, you realise, the code does not even work or you dont have authority to bill on it. By now, you can’t even be bothered to account it on your timesheets, hey presto! cost cutting budget trimming.
For a company that prizes itself on culture and the 7 signals, i’m beginning to wonder if Deloitte Tax has deflected from their underlying values and rewritten their own set of rules that govern how they run their management style. HR is obviously not doing its job. Get rid of them and bring in some real talent that can help the sinking ship that the practice group has become.
Ouch! Is your firm missing one of the “7 signals”?
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Your experience at Deloitte seems more like the rule than the exception. I had experience in other big 4′s. Deloitte Tax is especially bad. From my experience the partners are there purely to feather their own nest, and their team are only there to help them to that goal. Most of the partners I worked with were sociopaths; suffering from inadequacy complex about not working for a more glamorous accounting firm.
Graduates be warned.
As a Deloitte employee in Tax, I cannot agree with this article more!