In the interim, we wanted to publish this thought-provoking contribution from a reader whose name we have withheld. We found it fascinating. On the one hand, we imagine there will be readers who assume the individual concerned was the author of his own demise – an underperformer who was appropriately singled out by superiors. On the other hand, it could indeed be just how the author paints it – a disastrous run of bad luck that could have happened to anyone, regardless of their competence or willingness to contribute.
Whichever is true, we thought it warranted publication. As always, we invite your comments below, just keep it nice.
Dear Firm Spy,
I recently discovered your website and wanted to make the following contribution to your current body of knowledge on accounting firms. I understand that because my experiences were a while ago and to do with mainly small practices, it is unlikely they will be published, but I wanted to get them off my chest anyway, and who knows, more gossip about these firms might crop up in future.
This must be ancient history now, but on the issue of GFC redundancies, Moore Stephens Qld made (if memory serves) 11 people in Brisbane (possibly more across the state) redundant on the 1st of April 2009. I was one of them. I had only been with them for 5 months, but someone else had joined since I did and got to stay (hence not Last In First Out). I heard of an executive also among the retrenched who’d been there a decade or something.
Since MS, I took jobs at a few small practices also in Brisbane. These were all terrible. Basically the point I’m trying to make is that tiny practices can be just as bad as the big ones, ruled as despotically and myopically, with as little regard for their junior staff, productivity expectations being just as high (read unrealistic), high turnover, except without the perks of the larger firms, and barely any training to speak of.
[We wanted to jump in here and point out to readers that some of the "training" provided at Big4 accounting firms often comes with a catch. You'll recall we reported a couple of years ago, the following tip from a Deloitte spy:
If you fail 1 CA subject you get a warning, 2 subjects a written warning and 3… you’re fired!
This revelation came after we had received the following intel from Ernst & Young:
I’d like to mention that Ernst & Young also has the same policy to PwC in terms of failing 2 CA subjects and you’re out. But on top of that, if we fail a subject we owe E&Y $1k (per subject) for study assistance /time off etc. Can you believe it? We already work ridiculous hours to get through the piles of work AND we also have the added pressure of having to study and pass our CA subjects otherwise we could lose our jobs AND owe E&Y $1k! Theres really no such thing as “study assistance” because they’re gonna get their moneys worth anyway. Watch those fancy grad brochures… they are empty promises.
It was a similar story at PwC too:
… There are a lot of extremely pissed of employees at PwC feeling a little bit like indentured slaves that get dictated everything. [First] a … pay cut to take ‘flexible’ leave. [Second]That there is no overtime system anymore (not that TOIL was awesome, but at least it was something). now CA. This firm just does not stop – graduates stay away and make sure you ask questions about how long your are locked in for if you want to do CA! PwC can now fire you if you fail 2 subjects. It’s all under the ‘policy’. Payraises were so bad this year that 2nd year accountants are only being paid $1k more than 1st years.
So, it might be slightly off the mark to think that the bells and whistles at the major accounting firms are all that they’re cracked up to be. Now, back to our accountant}
You go in there to charge your time and you won’t recieve much if any mentoring, training or support. The practice I was at before MS called itself a boutique firm, and was fairly small, but was quite decent and definitely at the top of the heap.
After MS I started at a firm called Kern Group, based in Cairns or Mackay, and with the recent addition of a Brisbane office (the one I worked for). I was dropped after just under 3 months there due to just being within my probationary period, they told me they needed someone with more experience. Evidently no budget for training anyone. Talking to an ex colleague, one of the offices in north Qld fired grads after only a few months of service. I was appalled by this, but since reading about the Big 4 on your website, it seems this recruiting behaviour is more standard than I imagined. Fair enough from McDonalds, didn’t expect this from a professional services firm. The manager of the Brisbane office has since left, so I don’t know in what direction they are going at the moment, but I do know they have a bad a reputation among recruitment firms. A recruiter actually rang me up earlier this year asking me to speak to a candidate he was putting forward for a position who also got an offer from Kern Group, to give her an insight into the firm and hopefully convince her not to take up their offer (which I gladly did). This might be the first time you hear about these clowns, but it might not be the last.
In a pretty cruel stroke of fate the same thing happened to me at the next practice I worked for, which was basically a 1 partner and 3 staff firm so barely worth the mention but it’s really just to illustrate a point about small practices. Again, no training and high turnover.
Because I had no other options I accepted another role at a small practice (Kearney & Associates). It was in the process of going through a partnership split up at the time, which made the experience interesting to say the least. They never offered me a contract for some reason. And yes, no training, and would you believe it, high turnover. We changed premises not long after the split up, and the handful of staff had to nearly single handedly transform an old house nearby into a fully equipped accountancy practice. For months, the amount of ‘admin’, or non-chargeable time we had to occupy ourselves with was very high but the partner seemed to be in denial, constantly demanding we reach 85% chargeable every day. The manager he took on board fumed about the partner to us behind his back, and my colleague overheard him discussing our “lack of performance” with the partner behind our back, so with an environment this toxic and dysfunctional, the place has the potential to be a real stinker for quite a while.
All the while I was only accepting these jobs while waiting for an opportunity in commerce, but it never came. I have since begun study for a new career altogether (civil engineering draftsman, getting 6s and 7s), and would never look at accountancy again. I only originally picked accounting because I wanted a stable 9-5 ‘behind the scenes’ office job and couldn’t work out what I was interested in or good at, back then. Perhaps I should have discovered Firm Spy sooner… or those youtube videos parodying the profession.
Finally, about time cost billing …In the 2 and a half years I worked in the profession I can barely identify a job for which I had not exceeded the budgeted time and had to cop a write off (and this is only counting the time I put on WIP, not the time I put in regular overtime). To me the time cost system is flawed for a reason I haven’t seen anyone mention yet. It is designed to expect the same profit margin for different products. A letter, a telephone call explaining a tax mater, a BAS, an ITR, company financials, tax matters for sole traders all the way to large operations – these are all different products where the profit margin should vary. With the time cost billing system, your time is just one set unit thats worth the same across all clients and all jobs. Say a pair of Target shoes would fetch the retailer a 20% profit margin per unit, and they expect to sell lots of them, but Gucci shoes might fetch a 40% profit margin per unit but the retailer would expect to sell far fewer of them. So as an accountant, one week you’d be working on only individual tax returns, and the next week you’d be working on a large family group with several trusts and providing specialised advice regarding distributions, and all the while you’re expected to produce the same profit margin on every hour of your work, all year round. Basically holding you to account of something you have little if any control over.
Another issue that puzzled me is (save for the one pratice I was at that didn’t have a time cost system at all), my charge out rate was always about 6 times my gross hourly wage, when I thought the standard practice was meant to be 3 times (a third wages, a third overheads and a third profit). I have yet to find any explanation for this.
So as you can see from my rant, its not just the biggies that chew up young lives. Hope someone somewhere maybe got something out of this.
All the best,
[Withheld]
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The 1/3 salary, 1/3 overhead and 1/3 profit metric may still be relevant (assuming it ever was), but you have to account for all your write-offs and down time… so, whilst your charge out rate may have been 6 times your hourly rate, you would not have (as you point out) been able to bill all of the time you charged.
Anonymous’ comments are pretty on the money for the professional services industry. My (thanksfully brief) time at a Big4 offered the same experiences to me, and I have a friend who experienced similar while working in a mid-tier law firm as a Graduate Lawyer.
From experience, the expectations of job profitability are the nearly always the same, regardless of the type or complexity of the work. Non-chargeable hours are pretty much a no-no for client facing staff – if you have administrative work you do that outside of business hours.
Getting out of that Big4 was the best move I ever made, both personally and professionally. If you’re not prepared to stab people who will become your only friends (because you never have time for your own) in the back as you climb over them up the tree, I suggest you get out soon. I did…
Sounds like he has done the profession a favour by getting out..
BTW, hourly charge rates are an opportunity cost, not an actual cost
This should serve as a warning to all prospective graduates or lateral recruits in accounting or law. Firmspy loves to get stuck into the big firms – and my experience as a grad in a top-tier law firm was pretty horrible – but I know of plenty of others who started off at small firms (either by choice or through a lack of other options) and had it even worse. The hours might not have been quite as bad, but bullies and psychopaths hide out at small firms too, and they don’t need to worry about their mistreatment of staff being exposed by the AFR. Training can be non-existent, salaries are often well below market and you don’t get the benefit of having a well known name on your CV. That’s not to say you can’t be happy at a smaller firm, but do your due diligence thoroughly before making the move!
Agree with Anonymous and Ex-Big4
ccounting…I gave away one year of my youth to that bs profession.
Sure there were always some great people here and there, but in general the politics involved generally brought out the worst in people.
Furthermore, I never had respect for the work we carried out in audit, spreadsheet monkeys…
You think bigger firms are better because of the the perks? I disagree and think 2nd tiers are the worst of all. All the politics of Big 4 and none of the pay.
1. I watched a Manager humiliating a grad in the first week by laughing so loud and obnoxiously like a pig everyone turns to look. Why? The grad admitted they weren’t experienced with Div issues
2. They always hire staff for the busy season and fire them the day before their 6 month probation period expires (conveniently recovering the recruitment fee and paying contractor rates).
3. Making staff positions redundant whilst they are on maternity leave.
4. The Sleazy Partner always offers to give you a lift home from work events
5. Paying undergraduate accountants minimum wage or less ($15 per hour)
6. Secretly charging the clients WIP with an admin services fee to cover firm overheads / administration costs (Don’t the inflated charge out rates recoup these costs?)
7. Watching performance counselling sessions in open plan office that have gone on for hours where no discretion is used to conceal fact staff member is crying her eyes out .
8. Manager reasoned that overtime was less deserving of a reward than another staff member that didn’t charge time because the reward was “better productivity figures”.
9. Getting a call at 9.30 am to collect someones handbag and return to HR – they were just made redundant.
10. Working weekends, public holidays and very late nights, extremely lucky to get some toil if the partner is extremely charitable, got a meal once.
11. Having to go through the excruciating performance review process where you pretend to understand/agree with their stupid justifications and rationale for keeping your salary low. i.e the bell curve and performance ratings.
12. You are one of the lucky ones on the bell curve and get a rating ‘exceeding expectations’ so think the paltry risk is a joke. You try to negotiate but it doesn’t matter because according to them your already being overpaid compared to the market. No longer naive you come prepared with a range of salary surveys as evidence to refute this and you’re told the surveys are all wrong, biased and inaccurate because they are produced by recruiters and you ask to see the firms “accurate” salary survey and you’re told “sorry that information is confidential”!
13. They require you to “like” them on facebook and post bull shit comments on the wall!!!
F***en glad I work in industry..
Agree. Big 4 firms only exist as a risk management tool for corporates. No CFO or finance department likes them, or the up stuck up partners that come along.
They offer great training and provide a ‘leg up’ for something better – but it is a tough ask. I stayed for 6 years at a big 4 and left recently for the greener pastures in corporate. Now all these guys are sucking at my knee caps thinking I will get them meetings with the senior management team. Like hell….
A wise man once said “where there’s smoke there’s fire.” I vote: underperformer.
The sad thing is the vast majority of the original post and comments from people above are on the money.
The first 3 years are the toughest. If you can survive those then you have a good chance of leading a somewhat normal life in this game.
It all depends on your direct manager and how much of a chartered accountant wanker they are and your tolerance of all their wanking.
In my first role I worked for an idiot that chewed up WIP and did sweet F A. Boy what a test that was. The lunatic used to wear his CPA badge on his suit jacket with pride. What a knob jockey.
If you learn to accept the delusional reality that they live in – then you have a chance. I tolerated this idiot until I had enough experience up my belt. I then unleashed on the smelly prick. It was great.
It’s a jungle out there and your first two roles are critical to your survival. Be strong.
A piece of advice for anyone. DO NOT GO INTO AUDIT AT A BIG 4 OR A TOP TIER FIRM.
Your @rse will bleed and you will become as boring as batsh!t, with little time for anything but ticking with that magical green pen.
Good luck. May the force be with you.
Sounds like poster couldn’t handle accounting. At least he didn’t stay and whine the whole way.
It’s the way of the road mate!
CFK. I vote that you are a perpetual brown-nose or a another hapless minion of the human resources profession.
hrm.. but what can we do now if were already in a big 4 or top firm in audit and dying??
All the above mentioned I have seen and heard… but what can we do?
any advice from those who have been there and done that?
Is commerce alot better? OR do we need to go to the extreme as to changing professions?
I agree with the comment about mid-tiers – it is just as much work as big 4 and as much politics, but less pay, less perks, less training, no name on CV and half the budget!
@ Anonymous Feb 21 12:43 a.m.
I was formerly big 4.
Cliched, but honestly assess abilities and what you want to do. Get blunt opinions from close ones you trust regarding this.
Depending on the answer, it might be a simple transition to another area of accounting or a career overhaul.
IME, youth wasted on the young. If you dislike like accounting but play it safe and obtain CA qualifications you’ll be close to mid-twenties(on avg) and other responsibilities in life will begin to get in your way.
Personally, had sporting ambitions but was curtailed by injuries. To cut a long story short, I did not find a liking to accting work and some people there. Instead of starting the CA, opted for postgrad in math/stats (subsequently quit big 4). Later on, was picked up for quant and trading divisions (equity derivatives) of an IB.
Work is many times over, more complicated and challenging than anything you’ll find in accounting and the pay is substantially more.
I am the original poster, and have just discovered that my email was posted. Overall I am glad that it was, although I actually did specify in a subsequent email to Firm Spy that I did not want the name Kearney & Associates mentioned due to it being merely a firm in its infancy. I merely mentioned it to illustrate a point about small vs big firms, “small” being suburban 1 or 2 partners and a handful of staff.
Thanks to both corporate stooges who commented, your contributions provide light amusement as always. I was only fired by 2 firms, and both of these had sky high turnover and hired staff in the most myopic way you could imagine. And I wasn’t one of the guys that left the joint by 5 pm either.
Re the first comment about charge out rates, that may be true but that’s certainly not the way things were portrayed to us. The story we got is: charge out 6x wage 85% of the day and have no write offs, or you’re inefficient. The way I interpreted that was, either they lower their expectations or I find something else to do. Basically scare tactics to make us work long hours.
I didn’t even mention the CA/CPA. Talk about jumping through useless hoops. I tried one CPA subject, management accounting, had precious little idea what it was meant to be teaching me. Being good at circling boxes after reading gibberish questions doesn’t strike me as solid career skills. You could very likely learn things of greater value from a weekend DIY/car maintenance workshop than your entire CA/CPA (especially if you already have a business degree and work in the industry to begin with).
In the degree I’ve started I’m one of the most passionate and well performing of my class group. After all, there seems to be an instinct in all men to learn basic physics and build things, not learn what bureaucrats dream up and count other people’s money.
Bottom line, at least attempt to do something you love doing, or at least tolerate.
LOL, Ben. “That’s just the way she goes!”