We received the following comments from an anonymous Deloitte spy in response to our post from earlier in the month when we reported that the Big4 firm was losing audit seniors
We invite Deloitte to respond to the allegations (the veracity of which we cannot, of course, confirm).
Hi FS, In the spirit of friendly rivalry between those of us in Deloitte Tax and those in Deloitte Private, if you thought the number of audit seniors leaving Deloitte Private was bad, you should see what’s been going on in Deloitte Tax in Sydney. There has been a surge in the number of analysts, senior analysts and
Taxing timesmanagers who have been leaving the department over the past year. It’s got so bad that it’s woken Giam up from complacency to send a voicemail to all the partners in tax telling them to pull their finger out. While every group within tax has put in a good effort in producing several resignations, the group that has far excelled all others is without question the FSI group led by John
Giannakopoulos. Over the past couple of years, this group alone would’ve farewelled well over 20 employees, impressively losing on average about one person per month. In fact with a senior analyst and an analyst finishing up in the past week, there are currently no senior analysts in that group and of all the employees who started out as graduates in previous years, only one remains.
Good luck to the new grads of 2010.
A major problem in my opinion in that group seems to be with certain members of the management inefficient and bullies. I’ve heard that complaints have been made against them during the frequent and unrelenting exit interviews of the analysts, and I’ve heard an inter-departmental complaint was even made at one point. However these obvious concerns have clearly fallen on deaf ears to the point that the group is now without sufficient resources. The leadership, or lack thereof, shown by the partners in this group, to properly investigate the causes of the problem and take action, is appalling. Due to this lack of resources some of the work within the FSI group has been given to analysts in other tax groups that don’t specialise in financial services. Unless the problems with some of these members of management are addressed, this just means there is now a fresh batch of analysts from other groups who will soon start dwindling in number.
In the past few weeks, the national head of tax, John Womack, has also called for a “reallocation of resources” in the Sydney tax department, meaning the groups are to be merged from 5 specialised groups to 3 generic groups to account for the reduction in employees. This doesn’t rectify any of the problems in tax as it doesn’t address the reasons behind why people are leaving. So you can probably expect more people to be leaving in the future. If I were a client, I’d be worried – even if the partners aren’t.
Indeed. If the allegations of the anonymous Deloitte spy are to be believed, we too would be worried. We await further clarification from the firm.
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This story is true…!!!
Without a doubt, this post is true. As an employee, I have seen many of my peers jump (some jumped without having landed anything) within the last 6 months because they could not handle the management in tax.
I dont blame them. One problem which exists is that you have a management team (most of them are socially inept and have not taken their eyes from the tax act for the last 20 years), trying to manage intelligent, young analysts/seniors who, at times, would appreciate a little interaction.
Deloitte tax has been rotting now for at least a year, perhaps management is pleased that some people are leaving at their own free will so that they can keep the ‘no redundancy’ tag.
So true!
Wow, I had no idea at the time I posted the article that some people had left with no other job lined up (although I guess that’s something all of us in tax could consider doing…).
I have since found out that in the past year or so, there were at least 6 employees who, at the time of their resignation, had no job to go to. This is during the GFC! That is unbelievable.
UPDATE: Another analyst has just resigned from that group.
I’m in a completely different tax group and haven’t been here that long but even I’ve heard about all the allegations/rumours above. If I know about it, I think everyone knows! But morale in the tax department is pretty bad right now so I’m not surprised somebody in here is spilling the beans. What other recourse do we have if we want change to work in a better environment?
As a Deloitte employee in tax, I can say that this article is 100% truthful. It really is exactly as described. One particular manager is a bully and does not know how to do his job. He pushes all the work down to the analysts and does little himself, and then he gets all the credit once the work is passed up to a partner. Clearly he has brown-nosed his way up to where he is now as his tax technical abilities are a joke.
Also, something interesting to note. The partners in Deloitte Tax are now furiously attempting to “hunt down” the original poster. Rumours have it that John Giannakopoulos have ordered IT to go through emails and any other electronic historical data to find out who the “culprit” is.
Instead of trying to find out who wrote this (immensely accurate) article, perhaps they should focus their energy on bettering the management and retaining talent. This article should serve as a catalyst for some long overdue change, instead of turning the office into a witch-hunt!
Dont forget the two 2009 graduate analysts working in John Giannakopoulos’s group, who, to everyones surprise dissappeared one afternoon. Why? They were laid off a few days before probationary period was up. What a sly back door way to get rid of staff!
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.
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.
To “The Grass is not Green at Deloitte”
Who are the partners you’re referring to? I’ve just joined Deloitte Tax and would appreciate tips on who to avoid.
The fit partner & the sly partner but we cant avoid them, were stuck with them. People are going missing from this division. Communication is poor. Why doesnt things change after all this concern?
Hmm, sounds to me like some bitter non performers.
@ Hmm
Yeah… all 8 people who decided to write in to the website were non-performers. That’s a pretty high rate of underachievement, if you’re right, maybe Deloitte has a recruitment problem instead of a moral problem? (I said ‘IF’ you are right, clearly, you are not. Why else would Deloitte have the highest number of respondent confirmations for negative stories on this website for the big 4???)
You and the jaded appear to agree on one thing though, the Green Dot definitely seems to have a staff retention problem! You claim they’re getting managed out and they claim they’ve had enough…. Maybe people like yourself should take off their ‘I heart the Green Dot’ t-shirts once in a while and realise that the way to build a good services company is through strong investment in its people and if there is that much negative people management going on, that investment is clearly being corrupted!
Networking is how you grow the services industry champ – but someone like yourself no doubt doesn’t ever have to source work, they just get fed it from above and do enough that they can convince themselves they are more valuable than anyone else. The nature of the service industry relies on being able to bring in new customers and if you ‘manage out’ half your workforce every 2 years, what percentage of those people are going to say to their future employers, business partners, family members, friends and relatives ‘Don’t bother with Deloitte, they have no staff continuity there, we will just have to re-explain everything to the different guy who comes along next year and it will cost us money’. That’s the real issue. Deloitte either needs to recognise there is a serious flaw with its HR system if there is this much movement, or it needs to improve the working conditions for existing staff. Otherwise, in the long term, it’s looking much more likely in heading towards a ‘big 3′ in Australia with Deloitte bumbling around the mid tier.
Shame you appear that you’ll learn that lesson too late and miss out on some decent coin along the way, but hey, people only complain because they’re useless right? Not because they are actually getting mistreated and getting the lowest rates of pay in the big 4 and also lower rates than many of the mid tier firms under the guise of ‘market rate’.
Yellow Snow is right. You can’t try sustain external market dominance if you don’t first sort out your internal staffing issues. And I know the partners at Deloitte know and are worried about this, because they’re changing the structure of the tax groups so they don’t have to explain to clients why so many of the analysts who worked on the task are no longer at Deloitte.
I don’t believe that all these people were managed out.
How many went on to work for the other Big 3. I suspect many have woken up (except for the bitter person who keeps reposting under a pseudo name) that the work was not for them. There is no point hanging around somewhere where you don’t enjoy the work and just don’t get it. As a client I wouldn’t want to be paying for this extra hours. When was the last time you wanted to pay for someone to provide a service where the provider wasn’t passionate about quality and delivery of the service? I would much prefer to have a fresh team providing the services where their heart is in it especially if it means that they are adding more value. Not dead weights hanging around for new job opportunity or surfing the net.
By the way PWC, EY and KPMG have all reallocated resources to meet client needs and continue to do so. This is the sign of a Dynamic organisation. That is not news.
Let’s exclude those who have have made a concience career change choice. All that remains is the one or two big talkers yet non-performers.
I think there would be more opportunities for those new grads and lateral hires that join deloitte now that others have moved on.
whos the sly partner?
Who are the fit partner and the sly partner?
Is the fit/sly partner, Phil Lee?